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? _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
