Hello all,
I bought my NP4750 through PowerNotebooks.com (here in Canada, Eurocom was carrying it for 500$CDN more that I didn't want to pay as a broke student) in october 2004 as my first laptop with the intention of going mobile while getting a serious computing power upgrade from my aging 500MHz (first computer
), even maxed out at 320MB RAM and a total of 310GB storage.
I received it after 4 weeks (b/c I ordered a special keyboard they didn't have in stock) with a crack in the case just under the arrow keys, and, fortunately, after opening it I found that a speaker wire wasn't in its place and pushed the case when it was fastened, causing the crack. Nevertheless I was still happy with it, and it performed flawlessly until 18th december 2005, after this date it all of a sudden refused to get beyond POST, and I got the following errors: (copy pasted from the text file I sent to Sager)
- SOMETIMES optical drive wasn't detected
- When detected, it was not always possible to boot from a CD in it
- ALMOST ALWAYS hard drive model number wasn't detected correctly
- Hard drive does spinned OK in the laptop computer and worked fine
in desktop PC.
- OFTEN the POST test output the following line:
"PCI Parity Error on Bus/Device/Function at 0030h"
More of the same line always shown: 0040h, 0070h, 0071h
These adresses were sometime displayed IN ADDITION: 0000h, 0028h, 0060h
From the above I deduce that there must be a bad contact (fissured solder/whatever) somewhere around the southbridge, which doesn't seem a big issue as is.
However after more than 2 months trying to send it back to Sager for repair (FedEx failed 3 TIMES at it, and finally decided to refund me, then UPS first got problems with the f****** paranoid US customs, and second, said they didn't find Sager facility adress (!), but it finally got there), I received a mail from the tech support: the case has numerous small cracks, but it's not that expensive (about 50$US for the total), but the point is he told me that the whole motherboard was to change, for a whopping 455$US ! (The whole repair topping at 610$US) Previoulsy, I told my boss (which helped me get the taxes refunded on the machine) the issue, and he called PowerNotebooks to try getting a "commercially acceptable" solution to get a price on the repair, which he got (however with no precise value yet), but apparently, it hasn't been transmitted from PowerNotebooks to Sager Tech department !
Is there any place where I could get a NP4750 motherboard at a reasonnable price ? Or just getting the problem fixed without changing the whole bunch ? Or is Sager telling me the price they get it from Clevo, or so ? That's because, I didn't got rich in between, and more than 25% of the price I paid it back in 2004 seems too much for me, especially after just more than a year. And I don't take into account the 1 month (at best) downtime.
Of course, I hadn't asked for an extended warranty when I bought it, as I was told that, when vendors put a 3 years warranty on a product, that's because they know it won't fail in this period.
This issue doesn't makes me happy, as I see many people lovingly running their PowerBook with decent power AND battery life, still not having a single major issue with it in more than 3 years...
I bought my NP4750 through PowerNotebooks.com (here in Canada, Eurocom was carrying it for 500$CDN more that I didn't want to pay as a broke student) in october 2004 as my first laptop with the intention of going mobile while getting a serious computing power upgrade from my aging 500MHz (first computer
), even maxed out at 320MB RAM and a total of 310GB storage.I received it after 4 weeks (b/c I ordered a special keyboard they didn't have in stock) with a crack in the case just under the arrow keys, and, fortunately, after opening it I found that a speaker wire wasn't in its place and pushed the case when it was fastened, causing the crack. Nevertheless I was still happy with it, and it performed flawlessly until 18th december 2005, after this date it all of a sudden refused to get beyond POST, and I got the following errors: (copy pasted from the text file I sent to Sager)
- SOMETIMES optical drive wasn't detected
- When detected, it was not always possible to boot from a CD in it
- ALMOST ALWAYS hard drive model number wasn't detected correctly
- Hard drive does spinned OK in the laptop computer and worked fine
in desktop PC.
- OFTEN the POST test output the following line:
"PCI Parity Error on Bus/Device/Function at 0030h"
More of the same line always shown: 0040h, 0070h, 0071h
These adresses were sometime displayed IN ADDITION: 0000h, 0028h, 0060h
From the above I deduce that there must be a bad contact (fissured solder/whatever) somewhere around the southbridge, which doesn't seem a big issue as is.
However after more than 2 months trying to send it back to Sager for repair (FedEx failed 3 TIMES at it, and finally decided to refund me, then UPS first got problems with the f****** paranoid US customs, and second, said they didn't find Sager facility adress (!), but it finally got there), I received a mail from the tech support: the case has numerous small cracks, but it's not that expensive (about 50$US for the total), but the point is he told me that the whole motherboard was to change, for a whopping 455$US ! (The whole repair topping at 610$US) Previoulsy, I told my boss (which helped me get the taxes refunded on the machine) the issue, and he called PowerNotebooks to try getting a "commercially acceptable" solution to get a price on the repair, which he got (however with no precise value yet), but apparently, it hasn't been transmitted from PowerNotebooks to Sager Tech department !
Is there any place where I could get a NP4750 motherboard at a reasonnable price ? Or just getting the problem fixed without changing the whole bunch ? Or is Sager telling me the price they get it from Clevo, or so ? That's because, I didn't got rich in between, and more than 25% of the price I paid it back in 2004 seems too much for me, especially after just more than a year. And I don't take into account the 1 month (at best) downtime.
Of course, I hadn't asked for an extended warranty when I bought it, as I was told that, when vendors put a 3 years warranty on a product, that's because they know it won't fail in this period.
This issue doesn't makes me happy, as I see many people lovingly running their PowerBook with decent power AND battery life, still not having a single major issue with it in more than 3 years...
