Looky what Asus sent me

[Topcat]

About 8 months ago, I got a goodie box full of junk computer stuff.........and at the bottom of the box there was an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe. The board was packed with vented OST caps, board was beat to holy hell, VRM FET's were nothing but carbon soot, and the northbridge heatsink was missing.... I didn't even bother any attempts to repair the board, it was in such bad shape, so onto the scrap board shelf it went. A few weeks ago, I relocated all the boards that were on the scrap shelf because I needed the space for an incoming corporate job, and I came across the old P4C800. Being the board really wasn't that old, I had an idea..... I emailed Asus with the serial number in attempt to RMA it. They accepted the RMA, and I sent it in. I figured they'd take one look at it, laugh, and send it back to me with a note saying 'piss off'.... About 3 weeks later, a box shows up from Asus. I open it, and to my amazement, there's a brand new P4C800-E Deluxe in there!!!

Of course the new board is packed with those damn OST caps, so before I even powered it up, I recapped the entire board with Rubies (MBZ series). I stuck a P4 3GHz CPU in it, and some RAM, and she fired right up!! This will make a nice backup server in that Chenming case I traded for a couple months ago...

Damn, these Rubies are pretty!!








Soldering perfection!!


Just goes to show, you never know what treasures you don't even realize you have.... I was gonna pitch the board in the trash, and just thought I'd give it a shot. There was 6 months of warranty left on it when I sent it in...

[spaced<->out]

Re: Looky what Asus sent me

Hey TC, my PC is actually made on that board's "long-lost identical twin" too
Looky, you got the same software bundle sticker and everything

Mine came paid by someone else as well... We actually started with IIRC a "garden-variety" variant P4C800 but after only a couple of months the comp got smoked by we think a lightning strike. Fortunately insurance covered it for cost of replacement and repair. Board needed replacing but there were none of that model in the country so there was nothing for it but get the next one up


Makes me wonder though, if ASUS RMA'd your "beat to holy hell" mobo (you damn cunning...) they might well have RMA'd ours which showed no more damage than singed VRM.
They might even have RMA'd the P4B533-E before it which I'd corrupted the BIOS on ... although in the end I'm glad I kept that as it's been able to get it going again.

[Topcat]

Re: Looky what Asus sent me

So far its running just perfectly! I'll throw an OS on it soon, and it'll be added to the army badcaps.net folding machines!!

Spaced, I've got an Asus P4S533 that doesn't work..........HMMMMM It's an older P4 board, but maybe worth a try. It's a post-toasty in worse ways than the P4C800 was!

[Tom41]

Re: Looky what Asus sent me

Fortunately insurance covered it for cost of replacement and repair. Board needed replacing but there were none of that model in the country so there was nothing for it but get the next one up

That reminds me of what happened to my father's PC laptop. Suddenly, inexplicably, it would not boot up at all. Turn on the power, the LED comes on and the fan blows, and... nothing. The screen doesn't light up, there's no beep, it's not even going through the POST. The only thing you can do is press and hold the power button to force a power-off.
Well, it was still under the extended warranty he took out on it, so sent it back (it was a Fujitsu Siemens laptop). Apparently, it needed a new motherboard... but it was such a complex and costly operation to order and replace it, that they just sent us a more advanced model at their expense

It's still not perfect though. On a full charge, the battery lasts 30 SECONDS before dying! And there's no way of changing the battery without completely disassembling the machine down to the motherboard level! In addition to this, the screen has developed two faults - one is that the backlight occasionally flickers and dies; the only way to get it back on is to reboot the machine. The other fault (this one occurred more recently) is that anything that's supposed to be black on the screen comes out green
I can't help thinking that we were just sent the more advanced laptop because someone else had RMAed it

[spaced<->out]

Re: Looky what Asus sent me

Tom - is that dealing with the manufacturer or just a dealer? Because oh man, if you want to talk laptop dealers...

A little over three years ago my folks decided to buy my brother a laptop for university. They decided on buying a "refurbished" Dell Latitude from an online dealer and settle on a model with Pentium-II 366MHz, 128MB RAM.

It is delivered and I look it over.
Hey! This is only a Pentium 233MHz!
Hey! This has only 64MB of RAM!
And so on.

Call them up to ask about the discrepancy. Their explanation? "We ran out of the other model so we decided to send you this one instead!"

Given the circumstances, we kept what we'd been sent and they agreed to a partial refund on the price paid for the better laptop (after we'd called them to inquire mind you), but geez I couldn't believe they'd tried to pull that at the time. To its credit though, that lappy fulfilled its job until it was replaced in natural order, and it's still in moderate working condition today - some things like the CD drive and networking are suspect at best, but it runs and the battery has enough life to last through Windows boot up...