I have a question as to if or if not a certain company is
following the law.

        A few months ago I bought a new computer (Pentium 120MHz 16MB ram,
+ the whole works) and I have had some problems with it.  One of the most
recent problems is that the CPU Cooling Fan quit working.  I opened the
computer up, and I saw the fan not spinning at all.  This was causing
frequent crashing. (It started crashing frequently BEFORE I opened it)  I
called tech-support for the company, and they said that they would fix it
for free as stated under their Waranty.  They said I would have to ship it
all the way to California, and it would take 2 weeks at the minimum.  Well
as you probably know, I'm addicted to computers, and I do not want to live
with my SLOWER computer for 2 weeks.

        I asked the person at the end of the line if I could replace the
cooling fan myself, or pay a lisensed professional in my area to do it.
They said it would void my warranty if anybody except the folks at their
little company fixed it.

        I read their warranty and it said "Any hardware configuration
changes without written concent from ABS will void your warranty."  The
term "Hardware configuration" is rather vague.  It could mean any hardware
upgrades, bios settings, or even the drivers you use for your hardware.

        Now if there are any lawyers out there, is what they stated in
their warranty legal?  If it is legal, it is most certainly unethical.  I
know it is probably used to provent complete idiots from trying to perform
surgery on their PC, but they also said it would void the warranty if i
paid a lisensed professional to preform the switch.

        Well, in any case, I had it shipped a few days ago, and right now
i'm using my old 486 with 8mb ram.  I'm going to be stuck with this old
paperweight for a while, but I am really curious about this issue.

Any thoughts/opinions/questions/advice?

40 responses total.

  Offhand, it doesn't sound either illegal or unethical.  "Hardware
configuration change" is a bit subjective, but I'd generally take it
to mean anything you have to open up the computer's case to change.
Changing BIOS settings or loading new software drivers are what I'd
consider software changes.  In practice, I doubt they're all that
strict about it, and you could remove traces of hardware changes
even if they were, but that type of clause isn't all that unusual.

  As to whether I'd deal with the company again, I'd say probably not.
I would expect a company to mail me a replacement cooling fan, at the
very least if I sent them back the defective fan first.  (Unless it's
attached in a complex way, but all the ones I've seen pull right off).
The time and expense of shipping the entire computer is ridiculous.

  I had a similar problem about a year ago, where my motherboard's
battery was defective, and the company mailed me a replacement right
away.  If a person indicates the technical wherewithall to swap
simple parts, I think that's a better solution for both parties.

  Faster fixes or turnaround can be an advantage of buying locally,
and if you can't stand being without a computer, it's worth
considering when you buy a computer.  A few mail-order companies
offer on-sight service, but you pay a premium for such service.

Did they pay the return shipping cost? Probably not....that is a major
impediment to mail order shopping - to have to pay shipping every time the
warranty is exercised. I buy heavy things locally, as a result, unless
warranty service locally is guaranteed.

I all sounds fine and legal to me too.  Hope you didn't have to pay any
shipping cuse those junky little CPU fans most of the clones have in
them cost less than what it costs to ship the whole puter to CA!

Course, you could have told them to send you a new CPU fan or else you'd
have to wait to send the computer back till it quit all together ;-)

Yeah, it sounds legal to me, even though it's probably something you could
handle just fine yourself.

Look at it from their perspective.  They've probably got a fair amount of
customers who do know something about computers, and who could probably change
that sort of thing themselves if they had to.  Then, they've probably got a
large number of customers who don't have a clue what they're doing.  If you're
a computer company, and you promise to warranty a compuer no matter what the
customer does to it, you may end up having to deal with computers where users
who didn't know any better did things like soldering the RAM to the
motherboard, or plugging something in wrong and shorting it out, or something
like that.

Still, as others have said, I'd much rather deal with a more trusting company.

And at CCS we actually do get people trying to collect on warranty when they
have done things such as put the CPU in the socket with the wrong
orientation/bent pins/broke the ceramic package, soldered their SIMMs in (no
lie), connected the power to the motherboard reversed and melted
everything....

...nothing ventured, nothing gained...

(I always thought the power supply connector on PC mother boards was
a stupid choice.  What's wrong with something like AMP's 15 pin 
Mate-N-Lock connector?  You need a hammer to plug that in backwards.)

I'd guess that IBM didn't put much thought into reverse-polarity
protection when they set the standard.  They were only selling PC's to big
companies, right?  Big companies would have someone who really knew what
they were doing working on these systems, right?  ;)

Circuit board designers don't give much thought to maintenance, period. 
Soldered-in chip fuses....hrrrmph!

And don't forget soldered batteries!  A friend of mine plugged in the power
connectors to a new motherboard wrong once...pretty spectacular, capacitors
actually shot off the motherboard!  :-)

I can't claim to have matched that, though I did accidentally hook up an
LM317 voltage regulator wrong once, blowing the ceramic package completely
in two.  (If you're curious, I misread the pin-out diagram, thinking it
heatsink-up instead of heatsink-down.)  It was pretty startling,
especially seeing as it happened just as I was reaching for the circuit
board to adjust a trimpot. ;)

I once was shown a minicomputer board that was basically burned in half.  An
electrician was supposedly wiring in a 240-volt outlet for a disk drive to
plug in to (*that* dates this story, doesn't it? the disk drive was the size
of a large washing machine & held around 100 MB) & apparently managed to run
power through the computer itself ... possibly the disk controller board, I
don't recall.  But there was this charred streak stretching across the
material of the board ... quite impressive.

Well, here's an update:
I got the computer back just today, and the cpu fan problem is fixed, however
they really "Fixed" my system.  (And not in a good way)

They either  replaced my hard drive with a new one, or they formatted it, in
either case, when i got it back today the only thing it had was windows 95 on
it.  This really pissed me off

I am missing a TON of data and configuration files that i absolutely NEED

I called the company and they said that they don't have a copy of what was on
the computer. and they were just totally unhelpful.  I walked with the manger
of the people at tech-support and then i talked to his manager, up a few
levels, and i got nowhere....   I am just ttally pissed off.  Advice to the
computer buyer out there:

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES, BUY ANYTHING I MEAN *ANYTHING* FROM A COMPANY CALLED
"ABS"

You had a backup, I hope?

Have you tried the unformat command?

The unformat command did nothing.  I suspect they either did a low-level format
or they completely replaced my hard drive with another one.  In either case, I
lost everything.

Oh, an done more thing.  I did not have a backup, and here's why:

before i sent it to them, i asked if i could (asked the company) install a zip
drive temporarily too backup my stuff, and htey said that i couldn't install a
zip drive because it would void the warranty.    Either way, i'm screwed,
unless i wanted to buy  a few thousand floppies, i would lose everything.

  Tough break.  Lousy company.  For future reference, you can get
parallel-port Zip drives, which don't require opening up a computer
to install.

Maybe your HD got jarred to death in shipping?  Where I work we would have
recevered all possible data to our network and restored it to the new drive,
and we also would have called the customer and been upfront with them.  Sorry
to hear about your troubles.  OTOH, I did monthly full backups to about 250
floppies for years until I got a tape drive...

(250 floppies?  Wow!)

You mean Yuck!, don't you?  ;)
But I've never lost data.

I just back up data.  Never applications.

I back up my whole HD - then the whole thing can be restored in the event
of a crash, or a change of HDs (the latter being the only way I have used
backups). The very thought of reinstalling all the applications, INITS, etc,
leads me to back up the whole shebang.

My sentiments, Rane.

I wonder if ABS advertsed that they utilize ZIF sockets, making it easy
for customers to un/install CPUs (and heatsinks)....

At my company, Strategic Computer, a one-year on-site warranty good across
the country is a mere $60, probably not that much more than shipping a
computer back and forth.  And with 48-hour response time, one wouldn't be
without a computer for weeks, let alone run the risk of damaging the hard
drive or having it swapped out inadvertantly.

I wonder if the wiped hard drive might have been intentional.  It's amazing
how many problems can be caused by a user's settings/software/etc., so maybe
the company figured it could cut down on followup calls by removing any user
settings/software/etc., simplified to erasing everything on the hard drive.
I'd be pissed.

an afternote:  just today this computer's floppy drive died (just like 7 other
parts of the computer)

It would seem that a computer with 8 dead parts wpould not be much of a
computer.

Deal mail order with someone else.  Cut your loses.  Don't mess with that
dump.  Their warranty seems to be pretty useless anyway.

  Wow, floppy drives don't die all that often.  Are you sure that your
BIOS configuration is still correct for the floppy?  A friend of mine
has had a completely cursed system, with about one component failing
every month or two.  He also has to replace light bulbs more frequently
than seems normal, so he's now thinking that it might have to do with
lousy power in his apartment.  Though he seems to draw more than his
share of bad luck in life, so maybe it's just due to that.  :*)

Good point about power.  I knew a guy who had a display of parts lost to power
sags.  He had a motherboard, two video cards, and I/O card, and a hard drive
mounted on that wall.  Yuck!

Power sags?  I would assume line overvoltage is a more likely cause.  Perhaps
your friend should look into a switching power supply that'll produce rated
output when the line goes anywhere from 90 to 270 vac.  Add a real surge
protector too.

Sags are really dangerous.  Your spike protector is very important, but when
total power into the house drops to 100 watts you're screwed.

Sags are very hard on things like refrigeration compressors and other
motor driven devices that run under a constant load, but they should
have *no* negative effects on computers!  I've done all sorts of rigorous
drop out & low line testing on PCs and hve yet to see one suffer ill
effects as a result.  They just stop working till the line comes back
up.  Spikes, on the other hand...

Makes good sense.  I must be getting a coupe different ideas mixed up.  Now
that I thin k about it there aren't many digital devices that would be damaged
by undervolts.  Data loss yes, hurt, no.  That hard drive may be another
matter.  I'm not sure that the mechanism would try to park the heads if the
logic wasn't operating correctly.  I wonder...  Would that have been tested
in your work?

Yes.  Most computers have a line called Power Good coming in off of the
the power supply.  This indicates when the power supply is producing
correct voltages.  When the power supply senses power going out of range
it send that message down the Power Good wire.  This is usually attached
to a NMI on the CPU.
 
Hard drives are spun by brushless motors which are very closely regulated
in speed.  Most of the decent hard drives will shut down when they can
no longer maintain tight controll of the platter speed.  (I tested several
2.5" HD years ago.  The Seagate was the worst.  It would keep writing
and reading data even when subjected to G fources that would cause the
platter speed to vary.  Much of the data was no longer readable after 
the test and the drive kept coming up with errors.  Other drives would
simply shut down when they lost controll of platter speed and no data
was corrupted.)
 
Most hard drives park the heads on the surface.  If you think about it,
HDs don't have a chance to park heads when you hit the OFF switch either.
Some HDs have head supports that pop out on power loss that retract only
when there is power and the platters are up to speed.

  Do you mean the Power Good signal is transmitted to the drive?  If
so, how does it get from the power supply or motherboard to the drive?
What is the "NMI?"

No, the Power Good is not transmitted to the drive.  The drive can take
care of itself when power goes down.
 
A NMI is a Non Maskable Interrupt.  Say the system is writing to the DH
when power goes bad.  A NMI could be used to prevent erroneous stuff
being written to it before the CPU goes off in the weeds.  I really don't
know much about the Interrupt handlers and such, but I'm sure there are
several people on this system who do.  Suffice it to say that any decent
HD will take good care of itself in power-loss situations.  HD technology
has come a *LONG* ways since even the 5M ST-506 with iron oxide platters
and Mien Time Before Failure figures of 10K hrs.  I suspect even the cheap
drives available today take good care of themselves when power is lost.
The technology has been around for quite a while now and it's a very 
common event for a HD.

just for reference, ryan1, what is the name of this "company?"

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss