Oct 17 2017 11:44 AM
Oct 17 2017 11:44 AM
Microsoft,
I am a big fan. I own two xbox ones, and have a xbox X on the way. I also own a Surface Book, and have in the past owned a surface 3 (loved it). For my wife's business I purchased a Surface Studio. She does photo work and lay out work for her clients. The machine worked really well for her, with only a few blue screens, freezes, none responsive touch screen, non responsive keyboard, and.. did I mention the fact that it over heats? Yeah, it started off great, no issues the first couple of months, then the last month it got worse, during the same period the boot times were increasing more and more. It was always slower than the Surface Book at booting, and far slower than my Laptop (<8 seconds). It then started to crash with a blue screen that would change every time it booted. This blue screen appeared even when booting from a USB Surface Recovery stick. Occasionally I was able to get it to work properly for a few moments. Contacted support and asked for help. I've been working with computers, building, repairing, designing servers and infrastructure for 25 years. I know a broken computer when I see one. They walked me through a bunch of steps and we even tried the "erase your data" route. The computer failed.. which turned out to be fortunate.
On the computer at the time there were over 1000 photos from photoshoot at an agility competition along with some wild horse photos from a horse rescue group my wife works with. OneDrive didn't back them up. It didn't back them up because the bluescreen issue prevented it. Foolishly, or perhaps not so foolishly, I opened the surface to get to the hard drive. I'm not sure what engineer decided putting the hard drive under the heat sink was a good plan, but they should probably avoid doing that. It has a tendency to make data recovery difficult to impossible unless you're feeling brave. I was able to get the drive out, and the data had not been erased. I was able to recover most it, and found that the drive had a significant number of journal errors etc. While disassembling the machine I also noticed that the heat sink retention screw was broken. Probably thte source of some of the issues the machine was developing.
I then put the machine back together as best I could and as it was slated for destruction at MS there was really no harm in opening it, and the loss of data because of defective hardware would have constitued a large loss and damages to my wife's fledling business.
When I contacted service I informed them I had taken these steps to avoid MS being responsible for the data loss and business revenue loss, and the support person thanked me for being honest and tried to get a replacement. Then I never heard from them. I had to call back to find out what was going on. No one knew. They attempted to contact the "repair" facility several times over several days and several phone calls, and no one at the facility would answer, write back, or return the attempts at contact. I finally had enough and layed out three possible solutions.
1. The full replacement of the unit (because the supervisor said he was going to try and get that for me)
2. Have me pay for repairs / out of warranty replacement. I was a bit shocked to discover that defect surface studios are trashed (the screen and frame are saved) and the internals are replaced. Which means my opening has no effect on what you're going to do. So an out of warranty replacment seemed warrented.
3. Return the unit to me. I'll sell it for scrap on eBay. There's probably someone that needs a new screen and wants to be adventurous.
The problem I have isn't that you didn't do 1. It's that 2 was never offered, and when I called back the FIFTH time I got someone that told me it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a good customer and a microsoft fan who pays thousands a year to MS, and uses MS products and Supports MS by making applications and web applications that run on windows devices. Yes I even supported the phone!
I was then informed that the machine had been shipped back to me on the 10th of October, but no one had a tracking number... (this is a major problem, as the computer does not belong to you) but that it would likely show up in 5 to 7 days. It's day 7. No tracking number, no shipment has arrived.
My frustration, anger and now resentment toward Microsoft isn't based on the warranty rules, its based on the fact that you have no real plan to preserve good will, to repair your broken devices even when someone is willing to pay you to fix it. It's that I've had to call 6 times, that I was NEVER contacted by MS, and I've had to chase down every piece of information I've managed to gather.
This isn't how you treat loyal customers. This isn't how you treat people you want to have keep buying your products.
I was eagerly looking forward to the Surface Book 2 to replace my wife's computer. It was announced today, it looks great, but after this experience I have little incentive to purchase one. I just think about how I was treated, not that you didn't give me a repalcement, but you didn't think I mattered. You didn't communicate, you thought I could be ignored because the people that make these decissions arn't available for me to contact. Your repair facility thinks it can ignore me because.. well... I don't know.. but I'm pretty sure my 15 years of management experience are telling me someone should be losing their job.
I doubt you'll reply to this, you didn't reply to may 6 phone calls, but I thought this should be here, so that if someone else is having this same sort of trouble with you, they will understand it's not personal. It's just the way you are.