After a long awaited 5 weeks, my laptop has been returned to me!

Well, I posted the story on Robin’s BLOG as you can read here and here and here.

Basically, I gave Prostar my laptop at the beginning because the PCMCIA port broke, it was actually removed from the motherboard and just hanging off… so I sent it to them to fix, and they held it for 2 weeks then told me it would cost $150 to replace the motherboard, so I said forget it. Keep in mind it was still under warrant, but they said the problem wasn’t covered, FINE no big deal. I had them ship it back to me and I bought a $20 USB Wireless ethernet card, because the only reason I had used the PCMCIA port was for my Orinoco Silver PC Card to connect to our 802.11b network.

So they ship it back to me, and literally within 3 hours of using it, the screen flickers and goes black. I open it up and troubleshoot it a little, and I determine it’s something on the motherboard that went wrong. At this time the warranty had run out, so I was S.O.L. as they say. I send it back for RMA to Prostar for the second time, thinking it will be just the $150 to replace the motherboard and we’d be golden. They hold the laptop for 3 weeks before contacting me. Now I suppose that it is worth mention that they took it on about the 17th of December, so I could understand if they had limited faculty, but 3 weeks is ridiculous for holding an RMA and not contacting the owner. Finally they call me and tell me it will be $540 to fix, because the motherboard costs $350 and it will be $70 per hour to switch it out, and oh, they noticed two cosmetic cracks on the LCD backpanel so they want to replace that for $140 too.

I was peeved, for lack of a better word. I think about the problem for about 5 days, then I send them an e-mail saying how THEY should pay for the motherboard replacement since it was their fault it was broken. I was convinced that it was broken because of something they did with it at Prostar. After all, it worked perfectly even with the PCMCIA port hanging off the motherboard, it didn’t die until they shipped it back to me.

A week later they say they’ll cover the motherboard replacement, but not the LCD backpanel, I say that’s fine and they ship it back to me for $35. Problem solved! I received it last week and it runs perfectly. Even though they held the laptop for 5 weeks, it was worth it in the long run because I got it fixed when it wasn’t under warranty and it was (mostly) free!

So I take back all those bad things I said about you Prostar, you’re not so bad afterall.