NewEgg: Installing Linux Breaks Laptop

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?"

Comments

Unit cannot be resold as received?

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:Unit cannot be resold as received?

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Unit cannot be resold as received?

[Deathlizard]

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.

Re:NewEgg

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Unfortunate Reality of Being a Linux User

[TheGratefulNet]

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!