Sager Support Annoyance

First, forgive me if I posted this in the wrong place.

A few weeks ago, I emailed Sager for some help with my 5660 (CD-RW is locking the machine). I'd tested things heavily, lived with the problem for about 1.5 months, and finally broke down and decided to RMA it. At first, I sent them just the drive itself - nope, that's fine. So, I sent them the laptop. There was some initial annoyance because it turned out that my warranty expired on 2/6 and even though I'd been working with them on the problem in January (and even had an RMA), they weren't willing to extend my warranty by even a day or two to try something that could have saved them time and money.

Anyway...

I sent them the laptop and waited. After they had it for about a week, I received a message on 2/12 stating the following:

I was a little ticked off that they claim to have rec'd the laptop on 2/9 (my UPS logs say otherwise), but was happy that they replaced something, I suppose [FWIW, it's definitely not a software problem*]. I responded to this note immediately - particularly to check that they'd tested with CD-RW with two harddrives installed (the likely problem) and to tell them that I wanted to pay for a 2 Day return.

The days go by. No response.

I send email again. No response.

I send email again. A response the next day. I get just a tracking number.

According to UPS, my machine wasn't shipped until 2/18, *6* days later. And it's been sent "3 Day Select" which, thanks to the friggin' weekend, means that I don't get my machine until 2/23, a full 9 days later than I would have expected it, at least.

I want to be clear about something: I love my Sager. I'd buy another one. I am not afraid of the support or the warranty. But c'mon. I've been without a working CDRW since December (which sucks, believe me), and without my machine since 2/5. But their lack of communication and, in my instance, delay with getting my machine back really pisses me off. And if I get it back and I still have the problem, I may change my mind.

I just had to vent.

* Why isn't it a software problem? Because it broken in the middle of burning CDs under Linux. Because the CDRW locks up the machine in Windows OR Linux. Because reloading Windows from scratch hangs when you start accessing the CDR. And it started happening after I added a second drive, a slave to the CDRW. Sure, it COULD be a software problem...but I doubt it.

That's a great idea, one that hadn't occurred to me until after I sent them the CD-RW. However, I checked and it looks alright (plus, the hd has worked fine from day one). However, I have a feeling that if I remove the 2nd hd, the CDRW will start working right. THAT'S what I was willing to test before sending them the laptop, but they wouldn't allow that.

Grrrrrr.

The floppy bay. I had to pull my floppy out and order a piece from PCTORQUE and it worked like a charm. Check out the "56xx Accessories" on the PCTorque site and you'll see the bracket, etc., for the 2nd drive. Adam himself told me that's what they were for!

FWIW, when I spoke to the guys at Sager, they didn't remark that this was odd.