Early last December I bought a Bonobo Extreme, basically a Sager, who
is the US seller for Clevo notebooks (China). It will hold two
hard drives and two mSATA drives. I ordered it with one hard drive,
knowing that System76 will sell it only with straight Ubuntu, which I
dislike. I ordered separately an mSATA drive on which I put / and ~/
(Xubuntu), and then I reformatted the hard drive to wipe out their
Ubuntu.
The problem:
On July 20 the display suddenly went wonky with thin horizontal red
lines all over, most visible in the dark areas. Reboooting cured the
problem, but it continued to surface, sometimes only a few hours after
booting, sometimes as long as a couple of weeks.
I installed sensor widgets to my panel that displayed seven different
temperatures, and after a couple of weeks the temperature never went
above 53C for any of them, and the video corruption sometimes happened
when the temperatures were at their lowest - no temperature pattern.
At one time when the video was corrupt I hooked up an external monitor,
and its display was also corrupt. Conclusion: the signal is getting
corrupted before it gets to the display.
The warranty service:
I finally decided to return it under warranty. System76 has a
troubleshooting forum all their own on the Ubuntu forums, so I first
posted there. A System76 employee who monitors the forum immediately
responded that it sounded like the GPU had failed and suggested that I
open a support ticket, which I did. When I opened the support ticket I
wrote down everything that I knew, including all of the above. I
included a photo of the screen when corrupt and another of the same
screen when normal. (Had to take photos because screenshots displayed
normally after rebooting.)
System76 then asked me a number of questions, many of which indicated
that they had not read any of my literary opus. I answered them all and
they posted a shipping label for me to drop it off at UPS. There were
also excellent shipping instructions. It turns out that the address to
return it to is the same as Sager in City of Industry, CA, not Colorado,
the home of System76. Obviously System76 farms out repair work to
Sager. This makes sense, considering that they buy the computers from
Sager, as Clevo only sells directly to Sager in the US.
The support ticket consists of a web page that you can access by
logging in to your System76 account. The process involves a blog-like
question and answer conversation with the support person assigned to
your case. Just before shipping the computer to California I posted
that I was returning the computer sans operating system, as I planned
to remove the mSATA drive. I pointed out that this would be to their
benefit, as it would protected them from any claim that they had damaged
my data. And I indicated that there was nothing on the hard drive still
installed and they could feel free to load an OS on it if they wished.
I compiled a text document including all the details, starting with the
fact that I had removed the OS drive, including information like the
fact that the external monitor had also been corrupt. I printed this
document (one full page) and placed it on the keyboard before closing
the lid and putting the computer into its shipping box.
The UPS tracking number indicated that they received it late in the day
on Tuesday, September 9. On Thursday I received I communication from
System76 indicating that when they received the computer there was no
OS and asking permission to reload the OS. Annoyed at the fact that
they had not bothered to read my documentI referred them to it, knowing
that they would have seen it the moment they opened the lid. The
System76 person responded that he did not have the document but that he
would ask the repair people to look for it. He repeated the request for
permission to reload the OS.
At that point I explained to him that it was crucial for the repair
people to read the document, lest they wrongly assume it was the
screen, when it was most likely the GPU. In did not hide my annoyance
from the tone of this message. Since he had said that he did not have
the document I uploaded it to him. He replied by thanking me for the
upload.
This morning I received a message from the support person that the
repairs had been performed and that the computer had been shipped back
to me. Since the problem was random I was curious what repairs they had
performed, so I asked him. He replied that the GPU was faulty and had
been replaced.
I don't know if Sager ever actually read my document, nor do I know if
they have means of testing a GPU rather than waiting for it randomly to
fail. But at least my computer is on its way back home.
Next problem: What will happen when I put my mSATA drive back in and
try to boot to it after they installed Ubuntu on the hard drive?
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