Is the warranty of your giant good enough?

I lost access to the Internet for couple of days as my PC “died”. It started with the Vista operating system partition extremely fragmented causing excessive disk activities.

When I try to defrag the Master File Table and the partition using the so called boot-time defragmentation the defrag software somehow go haywire. When the system rebooted it complained that the windows loader was missing. Yeah big time mistake.

I had another partition running Windows 7 so I booted it up and it “senses” that my Vista partition is corrupted and tried to recover all the orphaned files. During the recovery the PC suddenly shut down by itself.

Pressing the power button doesn’t power the system anymore. Initially I thought it was the power supply unit so I took it out and indeed it has some burn smell emitting from the power supply unit.

Since it comes with 5 years warranty so that’s good and I took it back to the computer store when I bought it. Unfortunately the warranty claim cannot be processed immediately as they have to send the unit back to the dealer to get a replacement. This whole process will take one month!

So I bought another power supply unit and upon fitted it the PC still doesn’t want to power up. Another hour of investigation and I finally found the culprit. It was the new graphic cards that I bought a month ago. The moment I removed the graphic card from the motherboard, the PC immediately power up.

Again I took the graphic card back to the computer store and initiated a warranty claim. As expected the same one month waiting period apply.

If you have assembled your own PC lately than you would know that the latest motherboard from Asus/Gigabytes doesn’t come with any onboard graphic adapter. Without a graphic card, you will not be able to connect the monitor to your PC. I can either wait for a month for the warranty claim to be processed or my PC remained non functional during this period.

So I bought another graphic card (ouch) and reassembled the PC. Now I am back online and but still sore with the warranty system for computer parts in this part of the world. Apparently they favoured the seller rather than the buyer.

Their current practice is that if you return the part within 7 days, they will give you a one-to-one replacement on the spot. If you come back after 7 days, then they put the liability back to the dealer. Some even charge your some small amount for the delivery fees to send the part back and forth from the dealer.

This is the standard practice for most of the computer parts dealer in Low Yat Plaza. The main the reason they do this is to reduce their risk of carrying too much inventory just to cater for warranty claim. Given that some components like motherboard and high end graphic cards carry a 3 year warranty nowadays. They don’t want to keep stock for that long so they put this responsibility squarely back to the dealer.

My reading of the many posts in computer forums that the warranty claims in other places like the United State is much fairer. Most warranty claim will be processed within a week and the owner can get their PC up and running again. Over here we are at the mercy of the computer parts dealers and will have to fork out money upfront to fix our computer.

This reminded me that when I bought my giant, I only have one month warranty from my dealer. Luckily my giant was in good shape so I don’t have to make any claim from the dealer. I understand that some dealer gave longer warranty period but I think at least they will honour the warranty claim.

The most the owner will have to do is to leave the car for a day or two and then you are back on the road again. In fact I would imagine that the warranty costs for any fault parts on the giant will be much more expensive than those computer parts. Well I think the warranty claim for our giant is fairer than the computer parts!