Best Buy, Worst Repair

<begin rant>

Stuff like this pisses me off, so of course, why not write about it in my blog? :-)

About 1.5 years ago, I bought Margeaux an HP N5450 Pavilion laptop for school. Knowing how pissy laptops get with age, I decided to spring for the Best Buy extended warranty.
The money we were saving in rebates made the extra cost of the extended warranty a non issue.

Well, here it is a year and a half later, and the power jack on the motherboard shits the bed (yes, that’s a technical term). Since we got the extended warranty and the HP warranty had run out, no big deal right? Well, not at first.

We dropped the laptop off at the Best Buy repair desk on December 22nd. I’ve had laptops service before. Even replacing the mobo thought the manufacturer shouldn’t take more than a week. Well, four and a half weeks later and the tell us the laptop is fixed. Why it took four and a half weeks, I can only imagine but I have my theories. The main one is that they spent that time looking for a cheap power jack to solder onto the same motherboard.

Having been down this road with other things, I made sure we fired up the laptop at Best Buy before we left the store. It appeared to work, but the power jack was still a lot more loose than when it was brand new. But hey, to each his own, so we went home.

We get home, she plugs the laptop in, fires it up, and logs onto the net. All of a sudden, the laptop clicks and goes dead. No amount of power button pushing of adding/removing the batter will get this thing to boot up. So back to Best Buy she goes with the laptop.

Once there, they plug it in and it worked I am told, with the blue shirted wonders spouting something about power surges. Home she returns with the laptop in hand.
We plug it in, no dice. At this point I want to point out that it is plugged into a surge protector. So I let it sit for a while then try to plug it into the UPS in the office. No dice.
I would also like to point out that the UPS is a CyberPower 1500AVR, that “AVR” stands for Automatic Voltage Regulator. Think about that for a second. That means no power surges.

Tomorrow morning I will try this lappy at work on a completely different power grid. Assuming it still doesn’t work, I’m heading back to Best Buy to demand that they replace the motherboard, which is what should’ve happened to begin with.