RobFrain Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 I've phoned up alot of customer support centres in my time, however Samsung is the clear winner of worst customer support ever! We have approx 60 laptops/netbooks from them and we dont even know if our extra warranty has been registered with them as their phone support is awful. Yesterday we had a Samsung laptop with a hard drive problem. I rang them up and asked for help - they dont want the serial number or our warranty support pack number. The agent said to press F4 when the machine boots up to run diagnostics. We're an RM network and part of the build process removes this from the hard drive. The advisor then said that as we had removed this - the warranty is now invalid - anything else i can help you with? Shocked - I will ensuring that we never buy anything branded samsung ever again for the school - and possibly for home too if this is how they treat their customers. A simple google search shoes how bad they actually are! Fuming - we've paid extra for the warranty for three years!
rich_tech Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 I thought that wiping a disk could not invalidate a warranty, try escalating your call to management there personally, thats not a run of the mill problem.
RobFrain Posted October 1, 2013 Author Posted October 1, 2013 Any ideas on how to get their contact information? It all seems very locked down and very hard to find...
localzuk Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 As mentioned in another thread. EU law is clear on this matter. Changing the OS, wiping the hard drive, flashing a device etc... Cannot invalidate the EU mandated warranty (ie. the device must do its job as sold for 2 years). However, their 'extended' (ie. the extra stuff, like software support etc...) can be invalidated by it. Not being able to run a diagnostic tool is not enough for them to state that a hardware warranty is invalid. Rooting and flashing your device does not void the warranty in EU - Hook However! This law is a consumer protection law, and not a business protection law. I'd be demanding to speak to a supervisor if I were you, as changing the OS is normal in a business.
pete Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 Ask to speak to a supervisor. A change to software on a device should not invalidate a hardware warranty. If the hard drive was completely dead, pressing F4 would do nothing.
edutech4schools Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 This is why we get samsung laptops from StoneComputers as they take on the support. BTW never remove a samsung HDD it will invalidate the warranty.
pete Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 This is why we get samsung laptops from StoneComputers as they take on the support. BTW never remove a samsung HDD it will invalidate the warranty. Have you got a source for that? (Not saying you're wrong, just that if it's Samsung policy I'll ignore them as a hardware provider).
AngryTechnician Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 I had similar experience with them in 2009. Their NC10 netbooks were originally missing data from the SLIC table in the BIOS which meant that our Schools Agreement upgrade licenses would not recognise the machine as being licensed. Despite this clearly being a BIOS issue, Samsung refused to help as they would only provide assistance with the original OS. They then stealth-issued a BIOS update 2 months later that corrected the problem. Interesting to hear they haven't improved in 4 years.
mac_shinobi Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 (edited) I had similar experience with them in 2009. Their NC10 netbooks were originally missing data from the SLIC table in the BIOS which meant that our Schools Agreement upgrade licenses would not recognise the machine as being licensed. Despite this clearly being a BIOS issue, Samsung refused to help as they would only provide assistance with the original OS. They then stealth-issued a BIOS update 2 months later that corrected the problem. Interesting to hear they haven't improved in 4 years. I had a similar issue with Lenovo - took a few calls to be booked and found an article on there support site that explained what the issue was and they then booked for a motherboard to be replaced ( which originally they refused to do ). The 2nd motherboard they gave us worked fine and we had to complain to the account manager to get this sorted to make sure we get the correct motherboards that had the relevant SLIC entries / tables etc that were basically not OEM Boards as the KMS Licensing server was refusing to activate windows with an OEM Type board that was missing those relevant entries. Edited October 1, 2013 by mac_shinobi
mac_shinobi Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 That's the abbreviation, thanks for the correction @FN-GM lol, ooppss
difinity Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 The samsung customer service rep clearly didn@t have a clue. Hard drives fail. How are you supposed to run the diagnostics on a failed drive?
mac_shinobi Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 The samsung customer service rep clearly didn@t have a clue. Hard drives fail. How are you supposed to run the diagnostics on a failed drive? Dead as in the BIOS does not detect the drive what so ever or as in bad sectors etc or what exactly ?
sted Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 its bad enough registering warranties more than 15 they want a spreadsheet with serials in but its not on their website and phone support is useless i was on for over an hour asking for a template etc they just kept asking me what was wrong with the laptop aaaarrrggghhhhh. To this day im not sure if they registered correctly i just made up a csv file and sent it. I actually got so frustrated with their phone support i just called them useless and hung up after about the 3rd number/person
difinity Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 Dead as in the BIOS does not detect the drive what so ever or as in bad sectors etc or what exactly ? The OP was saying that the customer service rep was not covering the warranty as there was no recovery partition on the drive. If a drive fails then the customer can't run the diagnostics. Dell have similar software on their drives but will happily accept it when you run the hard drive diagnostic software from the manufacturer and give them the error code.
arh1a Posted October 1, 2013 Posted October 1, 2013 I've had this problem before years ago. Ever since that happened I do a Factory Image as soon as its out the box and keep the image for the warranty period. I know it wouldn't help with this problem with the hard drive failing as you wont be able to put the image back on, but like people said before if its died completely it wont show up in the BIOS which should be enough for Support to accept the hard drive is faulty. 1
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