Warranties for Parts and Labor

A while back, I helped a friend buy a computer.  It had a small form-factor, but quite competitive with the price point and features.  But mainly, I suggested the brand because of the warranty.  The company had a standard two year warranty on parts and one year warranty on labor.

I didn’t put much bearing into warranties before.  I had worked for a computer company before and some of our corporate and government clients had three year warranties included in the requests for proposals.  It’s more of a requirement for corporations and the government because of the concept of continuity of business.  Most times, this is also because these big enterprises still use the accounting model for depreciation of office equipment.  Me?  I personally prefer a capital expenditure model for a one-time cost of the computer rather than depreciate it for five years.  I mean, if I had a five year old computer, it would not have been upgraded several times in the first two years alone.  In which case, the concept of depreciation would not work.  But I digress.

I didn’t really think that the computer warranty would be that great an idea.  Until a several weeks ago, when the newly bought computer started having problems.  First it was the BIOS, it kept forgetting the settings.  And then the audio started to fail.  Soon, Windows XP was hanging if there was no activity.  And finally, the computer just failed.

Off to the dealer it went.  After an initial diagnosis, the motherboard had to be replaced.  Unfortunately, the model was out of stock.  It was replaced with a different model board with the same capability.  Next the hard disk was replaced, because some bad sectors were detected.  And then the DVD-ROM drive was also replaced because it didn’t recognize some disks.  Bottom line, three major pieces of equipment, zero cash out, and no charges whatsoever.

The concept of a warranty is that if anything goes wrong, you won’t have to pay for the parts or labor.  It’s good to see that the tech-guys really do go the extra mile for this.  There was no prompting needed in order for the parts to be replaced.  They only needed permission from the owner before replacing the part.  The good thing about all this is that the owner didn’t know much about these things and was all too happy at getting the computer back.  With all the new parts, fully functional.