I am officially never buying an ASUS product ever again!

[SilentScope864]

Hey guys,

So I'm officially never going to buy an ASUS product again. I have had the most horrible repair and customer service from them ever. Below is my horror story...

I bought an ASUS G53JW gaming laptop in February of this year in preparation for my deployment and thought it was a great value at only $1199 for the specs.

Specs:
Core i7 740qm
7200rpm 500gb HD
Nvidia GTX 460m 1.5GB
15" lcd panel @ 1920x1080
backlit keyboard
4GB ram

Upgrades:
additional 4GB of ram
64GB Corsair SSD

It was a pretty nice laptop and then the following happened...

I arrived in Baghdad in July and got settled in and decided to watch a movie one night. I turned on my laptop and mid-way through the movie I got a BSOD and it turned out my cooling fan on my processor went out because it would overheat and shut off...

I sent it in for repair in August and recieved it from repair in October. When it came back the LCD panel on the left side was not even attached to the bezel, the backlight was coming through and reflecting on the screen. The bezel and hinge cover were both broken. I opened the laptop to put my SSD back in and discovered that the 8gb of G skill DDR3 1333 ram had been replaced with 3 2gb sticks of generic DDR3 1066 ram. It also came with a battery I didn't ship it off with and the serial numbers had been smeared and none of my serial numbers match the 2 batteries I now have... To top it off it had animal hair all over the keyboard and inside when I recieved it... how does that happen? I think this wasn't even my laptop.

I sent it in for repair once again in November when I returned from Iraq for the previous issues and I just recieved it today. I opened it up and noticed immediately that the hinge cover was lifted up on one side, upon further inspection I saw something I could not believe... they super glued my screen bezel and my hinge cover back together... My laptop is discolored due to the super glue. The backlight issue wasn't repaired and is still shining out of the left side and they didn't replace the ram that was in it before... still 3 2gb sticks of generic slow ram. I started to surf the internet and the noticed what I thought was scratches on my screen which turned out to be dried up glue...

I called and spoke to customer service in ways that I would never speak to anyone because I'm usually a pretty nice person. This is rediculous though... They put me on the phone with a supervisor who then made a call to corporate ASUS who said they contracted out their computer repair to different companies and that it was not a reflection on ASUS... yes it is! He said that he was sorry for all the poor service I had recieved and that they will pay to ship this computer to the ASUS corporate office where they can take a look at it because they can't believe that a repair facility would super glue a laptop back together and send it to someone. To top it off the repair facility had even billed ASUS for my repairs which were replacing the bezel, hinge cover, ram, and motherboard... there was nothing wrong with my motherboard and my ram has not been replaced, and they superglued the other crap back together....

They said that they would have to replace the entire chassis, lcd screen, and everything if it has been ruined by the super glue... which it has and that they may just ship me a replacement laptop or the newest model since mine has now been discontinued.

So just be careful when buying a gaming laptop from ASUS, I have owned their desktop motherboards and video cards in the past but will never spend my money on any of their products again.


[CLR]SilentScope
Alan



I am shipping this laptop off once again...

[Skud]

Wow. They'd better give you a replacement! I wonder who's got your old parts?

[goldenfooler]

yea thats pretty bad. I try to only work with mid size companies for my computers.
While I have had no problems with my build for a tower.. which actually might be the good thing. If your going for a new one try digitalstormonline.com.
The Customer service was good when asking questions and has run BF3 with only slight hickups on the battlelog connection.

[Apache Warrior]

Do not be too mad at ASUS for wanting to see it first. They probably do believe you, but they do have to see it first. Before they can take any action against the vendor they have to have proof. Most likely this vendor will lose their contract with ASUS.
Apache

[SilentScope864]

@Apache, I hope they do...

I was always hesitant about buying a gaming laptop... I have come to the conclusion that they are not for gaming... I will be building a gaming desktop sometime within the next year though.

[Qicmee]

Wow!

My wild guess? ASUS qualified a new repair contractor and accepted a nice low bid (the buyer got a bonus). And then, they never audited the repair vendor. Meanwhile, the vendor went bankrupt, the qualified technicians left, and the only people left are family members trying to squeeze out as much as they can before running away.

ASUS didn't intend to be evil, but they were clearly incompetent. Now that you're talking directly to them, try to be polite, but continue asking direct questions about exactly how this happened. They will not answer, but they will be motivated to make you happy.

[goldenfooler]

also mention you are bloging about it with other gamers. This has been shown to be one of the quickest things. People tweeting it are usually contacted faster with complaints. Someones just running a simple search engine about tweets and finding key words.

Edit... make sure if you go this route you then quickly sing high praises for those involved who helped you.

[Skud]

Wow!

My wild guess? ASUS qualified a new repair contractor and accepted a nice low bid (the buyer got a bonus). And then, they never audited the repair vendor. Meanwhile, the vendor went bankrupt, the qualified technicians left, and the only people left are family members trying to squeeze out as much as they can before running away.

ASUS didn't intend to be evil, but they were clearly incompetent. Now that you're talking directly to them, try to be polite, but continue asking direct questions about exactly how this happened. They will not answer, but they will be motivated to make you happy.

As always, sage advice from master Qicmee!

[DougBob]

It would also help if we emailed ASUS customer support and express our displeasure at how they show support for our men and women overseas.

[WalkinTarget]

Animal hair ?? .... wow ... they were using it to herd the goats and camels back into the corral.


Asus tech support has been bad compared to every other vendor we had dealt with. My co-workers dread calling in repairs on a netbook due to the difficulties in getting an RMA on one.

[mapes]

If they ship you a brand new current laptop I think that shows that maybe ASUS is not all bad.

[SilentScope864]

If they ship you a brand new current laptop I think that shows that maybe ASUS is not all bad.

keyword in that sentence is "if"...

Even though they may send me a new laptop I don't want to go through all this again. I will never buy a product from them.

[SilentScope864]

So, I recieved a call today from ASUS about my laptop... They said they repaired my laptop and replaced the entire chassis. They said my backlight problem was very minor and that it happens to a lot of those laptops and they will do what they can to fix it.

The guy also said the glue issue was troubling and that ASUS and their other repair facilities would never do such a thing... I asked if he was insinuating that I would glue my laptop together... And he replied that his company nor any of the repair facilities would do that and that those were words out of my own mouth...

Wow... Really ASUS? What a POS company...

[Dead_And_Gone]

Cover up... .. . Not a smart thing...