So I think I'm getting the run around by a warranty repair center
Jealous Deva
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, a couple of years ago I bought a thinkpad t42, with a 64mb ATI radeon 9600 mobility. I have a 3 year extended warrenty which runs out in may.
About 4 or 5 months ago I started experiencing crashes when running Civilization 4, Titan quest, and galactic civilizations, and occasionally world of warcraft, games which up to that point had worked fine. What happens is very specific, the screen freezes but the cursor still moves and sound still works, this persists for 30 seconds or so until either the whole system hard reboots, or vpurecover restarts the graphics driver. This started occuring more and more often, and now I can't play the games for more than 4 or 5 minutes without them crashing. I have updated my drivers and tried omegadrivers, as well as tweaking settings (trying different shader versions, etc), nothing makes any difference.
So I took the computer in. The repair center kept it for a week, and now wants to return it to me, saying that the computer checks out on all tests, and that they can't find anything wrong with it, and that the issue may be with the specific program not supporting the card (which of course is bs, as all those games worked before and report compatibility with 9600s)
I'm pretty much at a loss right now as to what to do about this, I really don't even want to take the computer back as I feel that would constitute accepting thier statement. I'm not even sure they tested any of the games (which I provided CDs for), when I checked the customer service ticket page availible online, all it said was "computer passed all tests, multiple passes", and "sent computer back to call center for further testing, running 3dpipes screen saver". Which makes me very suspicious, since 3dpipes is hardly any kind of reasonable test for 3d application ability.
Anyone had any experience with stuff like this before? I'm really afraid that they're going to just refuse to do anything to it until after may when the warrenty runs out, at which point the thing will have probably stopped working entirely and I can look forward to a $300 charge for a replacement graphics card and motherboard.
About 4 or 5 months ago I started experiencing crashes when running Civilization 4, Titan quest, and galactic civilizations, and occasionally world of warcraft, games which up to that point had worked fine. What happens is very specific, the screen freezes but the cursor still moves and sound still works, this persists for 30 seconds or so until either the whole system hard reboots, or vpurecover restarts the graphics driver. This started occuring more and more often, and now I can't play the games for more than 4 or 5 minutes without them crashing. I have updated my drivers and tried omegadrivers, as well as tweaking settings (trying different shader versions, etc), nothing makes any difference.
So I took the computer in. The repair center kept it for a week, and now wants to return it to me, saying that the computer checks out on all tests, and that they can't find anything wrong with it, and that the issue may be with the specific program not supporting the card (which of course is bs, as all those games worked before and report compatibility with 9600s)
I'm pretty much at a loss right now as to what to do about this, I really don't even want to take the computer back as I feel that would constitute accepting thier statement. I'm not even sure they tested any of the games (which I provided CDs for), when I checked the customer service ticket page availible online, all it said was "computer passed all tests, multiple passes", and "sent computer back to call center for further testing, running 3dpipes screen saver". Which makes me very suspicious, since 3dpipes is hardly any kind of reasonable test for 3d application ability.
Anyone had any experience with stuff like this before? I'm really afraid that they're going to just refuse to do anything to it until after may when the warrenty runs out, at which point the thing will have probably stopped working entirely and I can look forward to a $300 charge for a replacement graphics card and motherboard.
Jealous Deva on
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Second, there could be a lot of things making your computer do this. Many of these things are easily user-fixable. It might just need to be cleaned. Laptops fill up with dust over time and this causes them to run hotter and eventually have hardware errors because of it. Also, have you ever reformatted this computer or are you running the same Windows XP installation as when you bought it?
But you said it worked fine until date x.
I dont think you're getting the run around, simply because this may be one of those things that a repair center cant duplicate - like an exploding CD. I had a brand new computer blow up my Sims2 CD, and took it back to CompUSA - they couldnt replicate the problem, but since fragments of the disk were still lodged in the drive, they gave me a new one.
It wasnt until years later, when Mythbusters tested that particular myth that I knew what had happened - a CD drive can accellerate a CD to the point that it starts to bend and warp from centrifical force, and then shatter.
I was lucky that CompUSA not only gave me a new CD drive, but they replaced the CD, too, because, really, all they had was my word for it. It was a one-off problem, hard, if not impossible to replicate.
They also replaced the fan on the motherboard, which was what was giving the fan error, the harddrive problem was incidental.