On 14 May 2013 14:39, James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Not necessarily Linux related, but I just got off the phone with a certain large computer manufacture trying to resolve a failed harddisk on a 3 month old computer, and they claim that installing an alternate OS has voided the warranty. In this case the computer shipped with Win7 and the "alternate OS" was XP, but I find the claim ludicrous as I install Linux on all sorts of PC's and the warranty callcenter has never skipped a beat as long as I can demonstrate the fault in an obvious way. This particular computer is a different brand though...
To me it sounds like maybe the person you spoke to doesn't know what they are talking about, and probably can't tell the difference between software and hardware problems.
Well that's a given. The person wasn't even necessarily even _in_ Australia, definitely didn't sound like they were originally from Australia, and may not know any more about IT than how to pronounce a few of the terms that are in their script. And (sadly) I wouldn't really expect otherwise. If their script says "warranty void if customer has installed something other than the default shipped OS" then that's the problem I'm looking to solve.
Its fair enough if you replace Windows with another operating system you will no longer get warranty support on Windows any more. Or any issues you may have with your new OS.
Then again, I don't think I would get that support with Windows even if I left Windows installed :-(
Yep. I get that their diagnostic procedure is "wipe it all back to a known factory condition and if the problem still persists then, and only then, are we willing to discuss that the problem is hardware related" but that's the easy way out, is completely unhelpful to the customer, and I think they could do better. Other manufactures do do better. I've had one warranty procedure that went like "download this diagnostic tool onto USB, boot off it, then send up the results". That quite nicely removes any doubt over issues with the installed software, but it was for a server product and not a PC. James