Quick recap of my laptop woes:
- Several weeks back the thing bricked on me. One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive. All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff. Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
- The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold. Nice. So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
- It isn’t. [50,000 very bad words redacted] So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally. So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas). This was yesterday (Monday) morning
- Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home. That’s about the only good news.
- Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput. On a brand-new computer. Cost to replace: $380 (part) + $150 (labor). For a machine that cost around $500 new. But:
- None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.
My options seem to be:
- Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
- Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
- Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function. (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
- Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.
To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.
And oh, by the way: if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future; DON’T.
*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.
Have you looked for a local place that does board-level repair? The issue may be as simple as a blown capacitor. Look up YT videos by Adamant IT, Louis Rossman, Paul Daniels, and others.
Kim, I mailed you a replacement laptop weeks ago. USPS says it was delivered to your box or whatever place receives your mail in Plano TX. PLEASE go check, it might solve your immediate problems and you can get the old drive from the POS Asus put in an external enclosure to use and access your files. Edward in MI
9536310999915231993039
Check your Inbox.
Seems to me that almost everything new that breaks present the same option – it’s cheaper to replace than to repair. Or at least cost neutral. I had to replace a 4-year-old oven because the damn control module went out and a new module cost more than the entire fucking oven! I treat computers (tablets, laptops, phones, etc.) as consumable commodities. Use it until it breaks and replace with something else. Sorry about your woes but damn we used to be a proper country where you could buy stuff that actually fucking worked and could be repaired easily when it broke.
Never ever buy appliances, automobiles, or electronics devices new.
Buy refurb, ideally ‘factory’ refurb, at worst ‘good used’ through Amazon. Let someone else do the quality control checking.
And, oh yes, don’t marry a virgin.
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Second this, I have had great luck with refurbs from micro-center
Wow, that blows. It’s a pity, too. Asus used to be very good, at least for what my wife and I use at home. At work, it used to all Sun machines (SPARC processors in workstations and servers, now it’s all Dell laptops (very good laptops, I must admit) and big-assed servers running scams of Linux virtual machines. But Asus motherboards and monitors were a constant for me for nearly 15 years. I’ve had a couple of high-quality Acer Chromebook (Google’s ChromeOS) laptops. They are more limited in software than a Windows, but mine have had Intel i5 processors, enough RAM and solid-state disk for everything I use a laptop for, with a superb, ultra-sharp screen that can be folded all the way back around and rotate 90° to make it somewhat thick 13″ tablet perfect for reading technical books with high-res photos and drawings I can zoom in on. I paid $600+ for a refurb that’s served well for several years. Acer is iffy, though. They’ve got a few really great little machines, but most are kind of, “M’eh.” The joke was that Apple laptops are produced in the same factory as Acers: Apples upstairs by Chinese near-slave labor, while Acers are put together in the basement by their children. But damned near nothing is repairable. It’s just swapping out major components.
“Scads of VMs”, not “scams”. Fucking autocorrupt, and I missed that until I hit “publish”.
Indeed. I’ve been a fan of Asus for more than 25 years myself, and would build using their components now. And friends to whom I recommended Asus laptops were always very happy with them. I guess even the Taiwanese build an Edsel every once in a while.
About 5 years ago I had an Asus that died pretty quickly too.
Right now I’m on a clunky huge 2016 Acer laptop that I pulled out of the closet after the Asus died. For internet browsing and a bit of word processing I don’t need any more.
Microsoft tells me this thing is too ancient for Windows 11. Who cares?
Louis Rossman, who does board-level repairs, recommends Lenovo. He buys them himself, and says he almost never sees them in his shop.
My Lenovo laptop decided that it didn’t want to power the screen anymore this past week.
I started looking online for a new unit and saw a bunch of ASUS sales, but knowing your problems just passed them by. Decided to return to HP (fm Staples) as my previous HP had served well, but I don’t remember why I parked it.
Oh, well……Onward we go into that great black internet galaxy.
Dunno how it works in the rest of the world, but when my computer(w-7) got too old I hit a couple of pawn shops and picked up a 3y/o ACER(~$150) with w-10 that’s been doing every thing I need to do up until I screwed up and let the microcrap f!$##! drop their latest update on me. Now Diqus no longer opens so I’m going to take the machine over to my local gruru and have him delete/uninstall that update. And then never shut down/restart the machine again, heh. . .
Kim,
I don’t know what happened /went wrong with the Thinkpad X60 I sent you some time ago. I suspect that it was possibly too old to take a ‘modern’ Windows OS, although it ran Fedora 35 (??) quite well.
If you still have it, try this: extract the hard drive/SSD from your ASUS machine, and put it into the Thinkpad. Thinkpads are made with pretty generic hardware, so that they can boot almost anything. You might get lucky… (which might depend upon the New Wife..!)
Could NOT get the Thinkpad to work. Not even my geeky kids could, either.
Thankee for the kind gesture. I really appreciate it.
And that goes for all you guys who sent me old ones… sadly, I never could get any up and running, but the thought was lovely.
For those of you with computers that suddenly died or wouldn’t fire up after sitting around, open it up and look carefully at all the capacitors. They are the components that, historically, are the most likely to have gone tits up. Manufacturing them is something of an art, and new makers often don’t understand this peculiarity. Since they don’t know this, they price them cheaper, and flood the market with little time bombs. Actually, some of the bigger ones can act just like a bomb, splashing corrosive guts all over the boards. If that sits too long, repair may be problematic.
Replacing them tends to be an easy and cheap fix, but don’t buy the same brand as you are replacing, if you can figure it out.