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NewEgg: Installing Linux Breaks Laptop

Posted by timothy on from the au-contrair-mon-frere dept.

Rick Zeman writes "According to the normally geek-friendly online store Newegg , installing Linux Mint is tantamount to breaking your new Lenovo laptop. Is it the purchaser's fault for not restoring the laptop to its original state of Windows-y goodness, or is NewEgg being too dogmatic trying to enforce a term that doesn't seem to exist?"

7 of 518 comments (clear)

  1. Unit cannot be resold as received? by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In their reply they said "Unit cannot be accepted or resold as received." Did she make it clear in her initial call that she was returning it for a hardware defect, and not just a general "I'm unsatisfied with it" return? I'm pretty sure that ANY hardware defective computer, with original OS or not, cannot be "resold as received." It sounds like the RMA may have mistakenly been issued as if it were a general return when it should have listed it as a hardware defect return.

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    1. Re:Unit cannot be resold as received? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even if there weren't a hardware defect, shouldn't they wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from scratch (to protect the second buyer from the possibility that the first buyer got some malware).

      Sounds like a good way to do identity theft - buy a laptop, install your favorite malware (infecting the Windows recovery partition to make it permanent just in case they do a recovery), then return it and let Bestbuy resell it to an unsuspecting customer. Use that user's stolen credit card/bank account details to repeat the process with another batch of laptops.

    2. Re:Unit cannot be resold as received? by cpu6502 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      AGAIN if you had read the article, you would know. The user tried running the laptop with Windows and the wireless modem still did not work.

      I wonder if you bought a laptop with Vista on it and then upgraded to Win7 would that also be covered by "original manufacturer's operating system has been removed." Newegg would probably deny it too.

      Fuckers.'
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    3. Re:Unit cannot be resold as received? by Deathlizard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Having to deal with E520's (the E525's are the AMD Variants), It's the PC.

      Now of course, the E525 is a bit different than the E520, but the Minute I read buzzing, MB immediately came to mind. We had no less than 20 of our E520 lot buzz over this past year. Most of them were the MB, but a few of them were the NIC/Power Board. In one case, the NIC/Power board actually melted and was smoking due to a Bad MB. Surprised one hasn't caught on fire yet.

      The other thing that goes bad is the LCD panels, which shows horizontal lines on them. I believe this is due to the way the LCD Panel is connected to the board. In many cases just flexing the case was enough to cause this to occur.

      The other big failure that they have is Fan Errors. apparently a small sticker on the case gets sucked in the fan which stops it. pretty much have to take the whole thing apart to get at it too.

      All I can say is that Lenovo is not IBM when it comes to Laptop build quality and leave it at that.

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  2. Re:NewEgg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So what is the go-to site for tech stuff?

  3. Re:Unfortunate Reality of Being a Linux User by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    its often less effort to open the machine, remove its drive, put drive on shelf (before first ever boot) and put your own laptop drive in (maybe even an ssd) and do whatever you need to.

    I have not stepped on a shipped os, probably ever. drives are cheap and I'll get a 2nd one to use for my own stuff. its exactly like this situation that you keep the original o/s and for me, the original drive sits unused.

    time is what I don't have lots of and doing an image backup then verify then restore later on is 3 steps I'd rather not do. yank the drive, do your stuff on your and if hardware craps out, shove the old drive back in and return it for fixing/warr work.

    plus, you NEVER have any of you files on that drive. no sector scan will EVER have your stuff on it. ever. that's nice, too!

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  4. Re:Unfortunate Reality of Being a Linux User by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    you can also use something like Clonezilla to make a complete backup of the original drive onto an external or network drive.

    I always use something like:

    gzip /dev/sda | nc myserver 33333

    and

    nc -l 33333 > foo-laptop-2012-06-image.gz

    so far I just have a bunch of worthless images cluttering up one of my server disks, and I'll probably delete them when I get rid of the hardware, but who knows, maybe they'll be needed some day.

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