Dear CyberpowerPC;

I purchased a PC from you in May of this year. I admit that I was purchasing as much for price as anything else. I bought a PC several years ago from your virtual clone IBuyPower and didn’t really have any problems.  In any case, I got what was a fairly high-end PC at the time.  When I got it, however, it had proven to be a fairly finicky beast.  It was generally reliable, but would occasionally reboot while playing a graphics-instensive PC game.  I wrote that off as a problem with the Nvidia 8800 GTX Superclocked.

However, right around mid-September, all hell broke lose.  The PC stopped POSTing the BIOS and was basically dead in the water.  I contacted your support line and they walked me through removing and re-inserting my RAM and ultimately decided that I had a bad stick of RAM and a bad motherboard.  I was issued an RMA for both and they were shipped.

It’s not my preference to do a mobo replacement myself on a new PC, but you don’t offer free shipping back to you (more on that later).

So I got the replacement mobo and replaced it, which wasn’t exactly my favorite weekend activity.

Still, no BIOS POST.

At this point, I had no choice but to return the unit.  And $120 later, it was on its way.  After a couple of weeks of it being gone, I was notified that you had once again replaced the motherboard, all 4GB of RAM, the graphics card, and the wireless card.  Holy cow!  WTF happened to the system!  I noted that practically everything but the hard drives were replaced.

Well, got it back and up and running with a fresh install of Vista and all seemed peachy for about a month.  And then, all of a sudden, I would get into a BSOD loop.  It wouldn’t boot.  Not even off the DVD most of the time.  Mind you, I had just got this back.  I managed to reinstall Vista finally, but it would start the BSOD cycle of death shortly thereafter.  This wasn’t a driver problem.

So I called your support line again.  Now, I didn’t mention earlier how difficult it is to actually SPEAK to someone in support.  It takes quite a bit of patience and persistence to finally get someone to pick up the phone.  When I finally got a hold of someone, I explained to him what was happening and that my investigations seemed to point to the HARD DRIVE(S) as the source of the problem.  But because this problem didn’t surface within the “2-3 week period” from getting my PC back, you will not pay for the shipping BACK to you to resolve this problem.

So once again, I am stuck with having to RMA the hard drives and replace them myself rather than send my PC back to you to get it taken care of.

Now, let me relate to you another OEM experience I am currently having.  I bought my wife an HP laptop in Dec. 2006.  You will note that it’s been exactly TWO YEARS since the purhcase.  Well, her laptop has been showing signs of GPU failure, most likely due to the bad Nvidia Mobile GPU’s that were used during the last couple of years.  Unfortunately for me, her laptop didn’t make it onto the “effected models” list for some crazy reason.  Well, I asked to speak with an escalation manager WHO TOOK CARE OF ME.  While he didn’t outright admit to it, he knew that my laptop was affected by this.  But he threw me a bone, and you know what?  This is what he did:

  • He shipped my a box to ship the laptop in (NOTE: I threw away my Cyberpower box and asked you if you would ship my one AT MY EXPENSE, but you wouldn’t).
  • He paid for ALL shipping back and forth
  • HP is going to do the mobo replacement on the laptop FREE OF CHARGE

THIS is good customer service.  And I didn’t have to call back a zillion times and be on hold.  HE called ME….. TWICE.

All I want is for my half-year-old PC to work.  And by that, I mean boot reliably and stay up until I shutdown.  But you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it now that you made the sale.  Your service technician wouldn’t even give me the name/email of a manager.  Oh, and let me throw on my Microsoftie hat for moment and add that you are partially responsible for destroying the Windows brand.  For all the grief I give the “Genius Bar”, at least Apple trains its people to take care of their customers, which is far more than I can say about you.

So, thank you, CyberpowerPC.  I hope to eventually get over all my hardware woes with this computer. Rest assured, however, that when it comes time to buy a new machine sometime down the road, I will not hesitate to eliminate CyberPowerPC from the list of possible vendors given the poor customer service – and, frankly, quality – I’ve experienced with this machine.  I hope that the experience between now and when I get all my problems resolved can at least be tolerable.

Thank you,

Jim

P.S.  Also note that I have yet to have the motherboard charge credited back to me for the RMA.  I have to call Accounting to get that resolved.

P.P.S.  When I got the “repaired” machine back, you neglected to hook up the front ports.  So all the USB, headphone, microphone ports in the front do not work.  Sloppy.