Customize ensemble notebook - not at PROPortable?

I am curious to hear Justin's view on certain resellers offering to customize RAM/CPU even in the ensemble lines of Asus. These resellers openly state that any customizations immediately void factory warranty and render the notebook non-returnable for any reason. Instead they offer their own promise to repair the notebook if it should go wrong.

PROPortable does not engage in this practice. So I wonder - is it purely an organizational decision not to do it or are there any deeper rooted causes and concerns?

 

I think this would be better as a PM to Justin himself.

 

Way to put that out there....... but it's been answered before. Basically, you're right...... it voids Asus' warranty. Let me list our reasons:

1. Asus' warranty, in our eyes and most others is one of the most valuable things about the ensemble models and is basically the best warranty you can get from any company. I think IBM offers an international warranty, but no one actually offers this to where you would send your notebook in to an actually "asus" office for legitimate repair or replacement work. We're also a Premier Partner for a reason.... we do what we think is best for the product and decide with Asus what's the best plan of action. This is not an activity they support (again, one reason they void the warranty), but at the same time they see no reason to stop it as long as someone else is responsible.

2. Basically Asus gets the same amount of money from us for an ensemble whether they have to warranty it or not. Which means if we or anyone else voids the warranty on the machine, Asus is still getting their part which pays for the warranty. If makes sense in one way that Asus wouldn't forbid this because they are actually making the same amount of money but don't have to warranty the unit anymore. At the same time, the dealers who are customizing them have to legally offer some warranty on a new computer. So they'll offer their own in replacement of Asus'. The biggest problem we see if that they are now expected to warrant the product for 1 or 2 years and they never made their cut to put towards future warranty work. They're legally bound to warranty it if they said they would, but not having a cut of that system to cover the warranty means all warranty work is being done at a loss. It's out of the goodness of their hearts I'm sure, but it's not a great business practice and eventually makes it difficult to cover problems.

3. OK, it did take us nearly a year to get Asus to make sure those who would customize their ensembles to post about them voiding the warranty and so forth, but that's now in place. You have to consider this. All ensembles come to the US in a sealed box from Taiwan. All companies who customize them do offer a service but they are messing with the integrity of Asus' model (hence the reason Asus voids their warranty).

4. You're buying the customized unit, so it might not mean anything to you... however the parts that are removed from your unit have to be used somewhere else. It would be ridiculous to think these parts just go and sit on a shelf (people would lose a lot of money doing that). So these parts which were originally installed and burnt-in in Taiwan on one Asus machine is going to end up being used on someone else' machine who ordered say a custom "built-on" model. Now, that probably doesn't mean much to others as I mentioned above, but when we tell customers their unit is built to order using all new parts, we wouldn't want to pull this cpu from here and this ram and hard drive from there and tell a customer they're all new parts. Or biggest thing is that we use Intel' boxed cpus (they provide a 3 year warranty from intel directly transferrable to the end-user if needed); Mainly Seagate hard drives and only Corsair RAM. Asus on the other hand uses OEM cpus (not uncommon but they only have a 30 day warranty to the OEM which is usually up before they reach the US anyway); Mainly Hitachi hard drives and their own OEM memory. For us to then use their parts wouldn't even work because customers of ours are expecting a certainly make and model.


I hope that sheds a little light on the subject..... Until Asus authorizes the top 5% of their dealers to service their units, this is how we're going to stay. We've been pushing for this type of backing from Asus and eventually they'll realize it's a better way to go.... but for now the voiding of Asus' warranty is something we think it more important than the bottom line.

 

Thanks for the detailed response, Justin. Sorry I should have done my homework on the forum before posting the question. You once already had a pretty iteresting discussion on the topic here.

 

I don't mind it..... sometimes it's that sort of stuff I should get made into a sticky..... FAQ's if you will..... If it helped you understand, super...... if it got a few others to get why we do what we do (or don't for that matter), then great!

 

I dont see the need to mod anything but the ram. Personally if you modded the cpu or the hd i would tell you too bad if asus dont honor it. If you add ram as long as you keep the original dont expect anyone to say anything. Worst case scenario open the back port and take out the added ram. The w3v as i see it was the most popular ensemble. It literally takes 1 minute to remove extra ram.

 

Yeah, I guess you could save yourself from the warranty trouble this way, but it's a bit of a waste if you want for ex. 2Gb of RAM, and your ensemble comes with two 512Mb modules. You end up simply wasting money equivalent to cost of 1Gb of RAM this way I imagine.

Although I just looked up a price for two 512M plates on some random website, and it looks to be under $140 for both. So not a fortune really.

 

You can waste you money, but we're not..... Basically you can leave that 512mb stick in there and upgrade the empty slot with another 512 or a 1gb stick and get up to 1.5gb.... but yeah.. if you want to go to 2gb, you'll loose that stick. The 512mb ram Asus uses in the ensembles is worth about $50-60...... the 2 year warranty is worth about $300 ($150 a year)...... so doing the upgrade yourself is the best option.