Saturday, January 24, 2009

Bite Me Gateway!



Well, we got our monitor back from Gateway, who is now Acer by the way. They called me the other day at work and told me they looked at the monitor and they found the problem but it was not a safety issue so they were shipping the monitor back. When I got the monitor back I hooked it up to see if they had fixed the problem. That was a big no. The screen would come on for a second and then shut off. I have been using the small flat screen TV from our bedroom as a monitor. So I only had one option to try and fix the monitor myself because there was no way I was buying a new one at this time. I opened it up and started to look around knowing that if it was smoking like Lori said there should be some clue inside of what burnt out.




Aha! There is the foul smelling little bugger. Now, what is it? I stared at it for awhile till I could make out some writing on the one just like it that you can see in blue. That is the color the black one should be. I looked on the internet and found out it is called a capacitor at 3000 volts. The next day I was making small talk with the father of of the guy whose house I am currently working on about my monitor and he just happed to have a capacitor in his shop and gave it to me for free! What luck.



So I went to Radio Shack on the way home from work and bought an electrical sautering iron and sauter, for a total cost of $13.45. I cut out the bad capacitor and sautered on the new one in three minutes, put it all back together, hooked it up and..............

I got my monitor back working by myself!


So gateway paid for the shipping to the service center and for the shipping back to my house, and when they had my monitor open inspecting it and found the problem they could have replaced a $1.00 part, and let us know it was not a safety issue, but they did find a part that burnt out and they went ahead and fixed it. You know, out of good customer service.
Lori and I would have bought Gateway products until the day we died.
Now they can forget it! Hope my computor last a long time but if it ever needs replacing it won't be with a Gatway/Acer product. As Lori would say, "They're dead to me!"

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your blog has given my day a refreshing start! I especially enjoyed the post about cats and dogs. Your daughter is absolutely beautiful!!! I hope you raise all the money you need... that is a great way to reach the masses.
We've applied for a grant and are praying for favor.