[ale] OT: BestBuy PSP

Jim Popovitch jimpop at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 22 15:06:43 EDT 2005


On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 16:51 -0400, Jonathan Chum wrote:
> I worked for CompUSA a couple of years ago and I know with the extended
> warranty on PDAs, if you broke the screen, you'll get a new one of the exact
> same model because they couldn't fix it. If they did not have one, they
> would get the next comparable model at the same price you bought yours
> originally. Laptops were also exchange, but I'm not sure what the condition
> the managers exchanged it for since it's rather difficult to break the
> laptop's screen unless you spilled coffee all over it.

I recently returned a high-end Toshiba labtop to CompUSA for ESP repair.
I was, to say the least, very satisfied with the process and the work
done.  The USB ports (and touchpad) on the laptop had stopped working,
the fix was a complete new laptop motherboard.  They quoted the work as
2 weeks but called me within 5 days to pick up the repaired laptop.  $0,
and all my data was intact on the harddrive.

> Warranty is the highest marked-up item in the store because it's relatively
> free for the store to save your contact information in a database. Most
> people loose their warranty information on don't know about loop holes such
> as the one described above. That's why these companies are making a killing
> by pushing warranty.

I did NOT have my warranty paperwork.  What I did was call CompUSA and
they gave me a 1-800 number to call.  The person on the phone
established the validity of the warranty based on the laptop serial
number and issued me a claim number that I took to a local CompUSA (not
the original purchase location) for the repair (which they shipped out).

This particular laptop was 2.5 years into a 3 year service plan.  The
original laptop cost close to $3,000 and the ESP was $350.  Well worth
it from my point of view.  Previously the dvd drive had quit working,
but that was within the first year and was covered under the OEM
(Toshiba) warranty and done via Richards Computers up in Roswell.

I am, to put it nicely, quite brutal on laptops.  Therefore an ESP makes
perfect sense to me.

-Jim P.





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