[ale] beware warranties on refurbished/reconditioned computers

[Richard Bronosky]

Six months ago my dad bought a "reconditioned" Acer Aspire A150 from
Tiger Direct. Yesterday he called me offering to send it to me to be
used as spare parts because tech support told him it sounded like a
bad system board. I told him surely a refurb comes with the full
original warranty. After all, you are buying a product that has been
returned and has a far greater likelihood of being defective. Well, it
turns out they they are sold with diminutive 3 month warranty! I would
have never dreamed they would do this. You are not saving very much
money. (From what I saw tonight the refurb is the same price as the
new model.) However, you are giving up a 12 month warranty.

The bad news is that I talked him through flashing the BIOS (which
tech support also tried to talk him through, but failed to tell him to
rename the firmware image to ZG5IA32.FD, so it failed) and the
computer is now back to its Ubuntu-tastic glory. "Bad news?" you ask.
Yes, if I would have kept my mouth shut I would be replacing my wife's
12 inch PowerBook with it!

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.!# RichardBronosky #!.