I am rather surprised that BB took you at your word about the amount you paid for your laptop because they are notorious for their shady customer service practices and general inflexibility but I guess narrowly avoiding a fire in your office building due to their product should result in flexibility from BB!

I did get my laptop free! But like you it was hell going through customer service to get it.

First laptop I got was a high end E-Machines from Best Buy with the leftover of my student loan check, I did get the BB service contract even though I didnt think I’d need it. Laptop worked great for more than two years except that it had a bleeding edge first generation 64 bit chip in it that lots of things were incompatible with. Eventually with so much use the power connection in the back started wearing out to where I had to keep pressure on it or it’d switch to battery.

Sent it in to get the power connection fixed, they said they’d call me when it was back in and waited and waited and waited. Eventually I went back to the store to see whats up and the clerk says “Oh you’re the one” … ??? What? that doesnt sound good! Turns out it had been damaged in shipping and now the screen was smashed, Best Buy was blaming FedEx and FedEx was blaming faulty packaging from BB, and my case had been wrapped up with some others in a law suit. Great…

They replaced the screen and I got it back 6 weeks later. By then there was a better version of Linux out that was supposed to have better wireless and 64 bit support. I immediately wiped the drive again and started a fresh install and went into the next room to watch movies on the company projector *shh* Well while I was out of the room the new cord they had given me overheated and caught on fire!

Back to BB now reallly pissed, one mention of a narrowly avoided fire at our office building because of their crappy replacement cord in front of everyone in line and the manager rushed over to hush me up, they opened a new box and gave me the cord from that. Went back home and yep motherboard is now fried too.

Back again to BB and now the manager just takes my laptop and says pick out a new one. I had to get something that cost the same as my old one, I told them how much it cost but they couldn’t track my receipt cause I paid in cash and just gave me the benefit of the doubt that I paid as much as I said I did, they’d only been out 3 days when I got it.

My junk laptop was more than 2 yrs old at that point so I eneded up getting a free upgrade to faster CPU, to a DVD R from CD RW, and 15 inch screen from a 14 inch. Nice, but it was about 4-5 months of hell first. The old laptop ironically worked great until I gave it to them to fix a minor annoying inconvenience.

Good to hear that you stuck to your guns trying to get your laptop fixed!

Thanks for posting this information, I usually pass on the service contracts, but now I’ll now take a second look next time I buy any electronic device!