Best Buy Great - Asus computers - questionable

[W1GUH]

When I got this laptop, an Asus 83Vb, after I checked it out, I bought an identical one for a friend who really needed an upgrade. That was last June. Well, hers crapped out last week. Just died and gave her a blue screen. Argh! Yikes...is mine next?

The good news is that Best Buy - under their service plan gave her a new computer and transferred all her files. When she got it home she was amazed that it came up perfectly. There's even more good news. She also discovered that the computer she'd gotten didn't have a DVD/CD drive...so, back to Best Buy, who swapped that for one WITH the drive.

Whew! So glad I got her the service plan and got one for myself. OTOH...hope this isn't an indication that this machine is about to crap out. Did a quick web search and didn't find any comments about lousy hardware reliability, so maybe that was a rare occurrence, or, maybe I don't know everything about the incident and there were contributing factors. Hope so.

This is mostly a post about how good Best Buy has been lately. Wonder how long that can last?

[KC2UGV]

I wouldn't worry about it. Asus, from my experience, is rather reliable.

[PA5COR]

I had some laptops over the years...

Currently running the Asus 7720G bought over a year back with extra memory and raid HD 's
Doing XP-Pro and windows 7 ultimate dual boot.

No problems with it, comes standard here with a full 2 year warranty.

[W1GUH]

Thanks for the reassurance, both of you.

I got some more detail about the problem. From what she described, the problem may have been that the BIOS got screwed up by a virus. The symptom was that the Asus logo came up, and then the machine froze....couldn't do anything with it, not even re-install the OS.

The question would be....how does one get it out of that state? This makes me glad to have linux on my PS3 -- it's a back-up route to the web.

[KC2UGV]

Thanks for the reassurance, both of you.

I got some more detail about the problem. From what she described, the problem may have been that the BIOS got screwed up by a virus. The symptom was that the Asus logo came up, and then the machine froze....couldn't do anything with it, not even re-install the OS.

The question would be....how does one get it out of that state? This makes me glad to have linux on my PS3 -- it's a back-up route to the web.

Re-flashing of the bios. There's usually a key press + boot media used (Either a floppy, USB key, or even a BIOS backup).

It varies from make to make, and model to model.

[W1GUH]

Trouble is, they couldn't make that key press work. It was Zeus'ed!

[PA5COR]

Some virus... :shock:

I use the laptop 10 to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Says something about the durabillety.
The Asus here didn't let me down once, not had a virus on the puter in ages.
While i'm on the net digging everywhere for stuff...

[W1GUH]

And thank you, too, for the re-assurance about Asus reliability. I've never had a virus, either, or at least one that was bad enough to be aware of. Don't know how she got it, only that she's going to be a lot more careful!