HP Service Center in Taipei wants to keep my Laptops old Motherboard after replacing it?

[Hamletintaiwan]

This is the first time where I got ripped off buying a second hand laptop.


I bought this HP Pressario v3000 from some second hand dealer on Bade lu.
He originally asked for 15 000NT$ but I dealt him down to just 8 000. Still, this turned out to be a bad deal because the motherboard gave up only a month later.
I did a memory test, to find out if the crashing was caused by faulty ram.The laptop crashed each time right away. I used linux mem test for that.

So I brought it to the HP service centre here in Taipei and I was very confident that replacing the memory would solve the problem.
The guy from the service centre told my wife on the phone that I need a new mother board 5300NT$ and told her that they will keep the old one.


5300NT$ for a new board, I understand that part but keeping my old one is something I can't understand .
Is it because the board comes with a Vista license or am I being ripped off part two in a row?

[Nam]

They do this because to keep their costs down.

They are selling you a refurbished board and will keep yours for the same purpose- to refurbish it and keep it on hand for the next person who may need it.
Otherwise, it would cost you closer to $15,000 for a new motherboard.

Manufacturers stop making new boards at a certain point and only refurbish damaged or faulty ones.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be available at all. It's just not fisable

[Nam]

Sorry, guess my thumb tapped something it shouldn't have..

Anyway..

What I meant was, I just wouldn't be feasible for them to keep producing new boards, when the product line has been terminated.

Hope this helps you understand how it actually works.

Feel free to give me a shout if you need any further advice on the matter.

[tommy525]

Sounds fair to me. You buy a starter or a alternator for your car in the usa, they want the old one back. So they can refurb that one and sell it on. Otherwise you pay the cost for a NEW one and thats a LOT more. Course I went ahead and bought a NEW alternator and a NEW starter but i left my old ones with the shop. Give them a few bucks. What the hell I wanna do with them anyway?

Why would you want to keep your old MOtherBoard anyhows? IT wont do u much good.

[Hamletintaiwan]

Thanks everyone!
I got my laptop back today.
They actually gave me a new 2G stick of free ram since the one installed was not from HP.
It got me a little worried, because it could have been a memory problem only.

Back home, I changed the hard drive to the one with Linux on it and after some checks, I am sure the board is a "new" one (refurbished) never really knew what that means.
The mac address has changed and the GPU is running at a higher temperature.

Let's hope that it will last a couple of years.