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In New Zealand, there is a law called ” Consumer Gurantees Act “. All electronics sold in New Zealand at shops , are subject to 1 year warranty. If it doesn’t have it, you can’t sell it. On top of this, the Consumer Gurantees Act has a mention that all items sold has to last a reasonable amount of time. When people fork over $2000 on a plasma tv, they expect it to last them 5 – 10 years without issues. Even if you are only given 1 year warranty, if they stop working after 1 year, what you need to do is to take the company who sold you the item to small claims court. The fee is $25 in most places. The adjudicator will ask the manufacturer what the reasonable life expectancy of the item. No company in the world will say that the item that they have manufactured is only supposed to last 1 year.

I’ve gotten my washing machine fixed twice, and a tv replaced with this. I love New Zealand.

Imran

1) Murphy laws, if something will go wrong, it will. esp true applying to Electronics Components like computer parts, they are just too freaking fragile.

2) Most ppl buy a laptop and expect a lifespan for 2 to 3 years. But most manufacturers comes with only 1 year warranty. Extend it if possible, it’s justifiable when the warranty cost 20% or less than the total unit cost. (aka buying a $2000 laptops and paying less than $400 for 3 years warranty). Your investment will be worth while esp we want piece of mind, and we want assurance our parts will be there when our machines go haywire (which it will, just a matter of time). Bear in mind, for laptops, you cannot easily find replacement or compatible parts, most of the time only the brand manufacturers carried it. So if they stop producing the parts and running out of stocks while you are in your warranty period. voila! time for a new laptop. :)

3) Certain extended warranty services like Dell (in Malaysia, my country) offer on-site services. They come to your door steps via their appointed technician to fix your problems. And if they cannot fix it for you, they replace the whole damn thing for you. Trust me, they replace the whole unit of projector for me and they have replace the whole LCD screen for my fren laptop. (of coz, they eventually pass the cost back to their taiwanese supplier)

See the benefits? we don’t need to waste extra fuel and TIME driving to the service centre, find a parking, dump the broken machine and expect 5 working days to repair (if you are lucky).

I once bought an acer laptop, guess what, the motherboard crashed just one week after the 1 year warranty period, it cost me RM900 (~USD 280) to just replace the damn board. If i opt for extended warranty, it would save me an additional RM600 (~USD 190)while giving me additional 2 years extension on the warranty.

So buy extended warranty (when you buy laptop) and trust me, from my experience thus far, i never regret it.

This post is about personal gear and as end user consumer. Most Government and corporate decisions are made by higher authorities, so I’ve no control over them. Yes, at work place we do have 4 hrs replacement warranty with all major suppliers such as Sun, Cisco etc.

I should have mentioned this in my post itself.. heh

Appreciate your post.

It is cheaper to pay for repairs as and when they happen rather than buy a warranty. Extended warranties are not a good investment, period.

If your time, and the time of everyone who uses your servers, is free, that might be true.

When 20 engineers sit and wait while you fix a vexing problem, and there is no 4 hour warranty to open a priority ticket on, how much does that cost? It can easily cost more than the cost of the entire server cluster.

And yes, I have had several server motherboards replaced on a four hour basis, a RAID backplane, several RAID disk drives (did it myself but special courier delivered FibreChannel drives in 2.9 hours), other stuff… while managers fiddled and festered and engineers said they wouldn’t make deadlines. In only one case did a system require a second set of parts, made the first call in the morning, first try in the afternoon, second set of parts the following morning, system up and running with less than 24 hours of downtime. In the meantime, I got other work done instead of working the phones trying to track down who had the part and who could FedEx the fastest.

-Ken

You have only 5 servers, so maybe you can cache enough essential parts. I have also have less-than mission-critical commodity servers bought in bulk, where the extra servers serve as my parts cache. Even there, they came with a vendor basic 3 year warranty, through which I have gotten replacement parts. I just let a few parts pile up and after a few months RMA them together.

Do you have a half-dozen users waiting by your door while you sort out a finger-pointing exercise between your M/B manufacturer and your O/S vendor?

Question 2 is baffling. All repairs happen in my own lab, either by myself for the non-critical stuff, or by the Dell/IBM/Sun/HP technician (yes I use them all) 4 hours or less after I make the call.

Your advice gets down to the old debate, if you build it yourself, you have ultimate control over your system. You are also responsible for all downtime and sorting out all inter-vendor snafu’s, not to mention a different RMA process for each vendor you are dealing with. I have 6 to deal with – IBM, Sun, HP, Dell, Seagate, and WD. How many do you? Let’s see, add in video card vendors M/B vendors, yada yada yada, I bet it’s 20 or more.

-Ken.

phreakincool: I agree with keeping paperwork safe. Note, though, that a fireproof safe is not waterproof. I learned that several years ago when our apartment flooded out. :(

For the sake of supporting companies, and to be able to have a short Time-To-Recover when disaster happens, you need a good support contract, to be sure to get spare parts quickly.

Oh what an irony I see lenovo laptop ad with free 3 year warranty updated ;)