My new $3,000 laptop just stopped charging. The little light by the keyboard is always on, the little light on the side is also always on, regardless of the charger being plugged in or not, and my battery is being drained. I have about 30% and I turned it off so I can come up with a plan how to copy and save my files to a computer that actually works. What is the process of sending this piece of **** to the manufacturer?
No response.
Long saga for many detailed here. I got lucky with a second one that has worked without error after one full unit replacement (almost a full year now). Others have not been so fortunate.
How about the response? Have they answered? I have a dead $3,000 laptop siting on my desk and these people are ignoring my mail.
I find it incredible that the company that charges $3,000 for a laptop has a discussion group instead of a functioning technical support and customer service. Discussion groups are for open source projects where developers are volunteers not for company that charges obscene amounts of money for inferior products. The question is how do you make these people listen and fix their shortcomings? They clearly do not care about what people say about them online. Reviews mean nothing to them, they do not answer the BBB complaints. What is left? A class action suit?
Their response eaten as spam?
Purism responded after I had put two specific names on the CC and resent. As for possible spam: My email provider, GoDaddy switched to M$ recently and with them, anything is possible. No matter. The process seems to have started. I will keep this thread updated as I go.
Update: Purism accepted my warranty call and asked me to send the laptop in. On my dime, BTW. I was instructed that if I wanted to keep my precious private data, I would need to remove the disk from the laptop and keep it until I get my repaired or new laptop back. I followed the video but I could not pop the back cover. It was stuck and without a special plastic “pick” I would have only broken or scratched it. So I guess I will have to send my data to Purism and hope that they will send it back to me untouched. The assumption here is that the disk is encrypted and my data cannot be read by anyone. Well, there is no way for me to prove or disprove that claim. As they say, trust is a very good thing to have.
I had to RMA my L14 three times for the same issue. I’m a couple of weeks into using it and it looks like they finally got it this time. It was an incredibly frustrating experience, and I didn’t appreciate the fact that it made me look like a fool at work. The first time I emailed their response got flagged as spam and it took me a bit to find it.
The back cover is a little tricky with pretty close tolerances and a pick/spudger makes life a bit easier. An old credit card will work almost as well. I’ve had to take mine off a dozen times at this point, so I’m used to it.
I can tell by the things you’re complaining about and the adjectives you’re using that you’re not someone who’s especially technical. While there are many things to fault Purism for, your poor backup practices and inability to disassemble the laptop to pull your SSD aren’t really fair criticisms.
Not really. Isn’t that the point of open source? You can be absolutely sure that the disk is encrypted and you can be absolutely sure of what encryption standards are being used. (I believe it will be XTS-AES by default.)
Can you be absolutely sure that the chosen encryption standard is not (secretly) cryptographically broken or backdoored? Well, no, but that is a much bigger question that this topic. Assuming that you are using the default noted in the previous paragraph then it has been publicly reviewed by many independent parties over 15 years.
If you mean that you aren’t even sure whether you are using disk encryption then I think the answer should be: if during the early boot you are prompted for a disk encryption passphrase then you are using disk encryption. (And if you aren’t so prompted then sadly you aren’t using disk encryption - and you are trusting Purism and everyone in between not to peek at your data.)
If you can run off mains power then you could image the disk to an external drive and then shred the internal drive.
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I am pretty sure the the US Government does not allow any domestic producer to sell equipment without what is called a back door. However, that is a bigger issue and it is not specific to this incident. The problem is somewhere else.
My laptop died in such a way that I could not remove or copy the data on the disk. Granted, as EasyMac308 pointed out, I could have tried harder but even that is not the issue here. The real issue is that one cannot use this laptop as a mission critical piece of equipment. No matter how fast it is possible to repair these laptops, I am sure we are talking weeks. So what if someone had critical data on it without being prudent enough a keep redundant copies? Say, an attorney? Well, tough luck. That is the biggest problem here. This is not professional equipment. These laptops are just very expensive toys.
This falls under “due diligence.” Hardware from everybody fails. It’s on the user to prepare for that.
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Here’s what I do (for any computer) … whatever the internal disk type is, I have an enclosure for it.
If the computer fails, remove the internal disk, put it in an enclosure, attach the enclosure to a cheaper spare computer, jigger DHCP IP address assignments if needed, boot the other computer from the enclosure. Work continues with minimal delay - and the vendor can take several weeks to repair and return the original. (I understand that in this case, for some reason, you have been unable to open up the computer in order to remove the internal disk.)
Of course if it is the disk itself that fails then, for absolutely all computers, you take responsibility for managing that eventuality, whether that’s via RAID and backup, or backup alone.
Thank you for the advice, but this is not for everyone. I understand software quite well, but I am not a hardware person. Moreover, there may be non-technical laptop owners out there who would be completely unable to even understand what you are saying. It is possible that everyone on this discussion group is, pardon the expression, a nerd, but I am not aware of any statement by Purims in that their equipment was intended for technically savvy people only.
My update: I got a non-binding ETA to have my laptop fixed before Purism’s end of the year break. If that does not happen, January it is.
I totally accept that.
This kind of activity comes up either in the event of some kind of hardware failure or because you want to upgrade to a bigger disk. If a person is not confident doing that then most people can get to their nearest computer store who would be able to whip out the old disk.
I’m not a hardware person either but removing disks (and/or RAM) has become simpler and easier over the years. I have no doubt that the participants in this forum are skewed towards being more technically savvy though.
My update: As expected, my laptop repair has been pushed out to the new year. I do not believe that needs any comments, but I have a story to tell.
What led a skeptic like myself to fall for the Purism trap? Well, I actually did some research but my source(s) turned out to be biased. I read a pretty comprehensive article on TechRadar that reviewed various Linux laptops. That was the decision making point on my side. After my initial disappointment with Purism, I wrote a letter to the author of the said article and essentially complained about lack of their journalistic work, or possible even ethics, due to the fact that no criticism was exercised there.
Of course, they came up with usual excuses that do not need to be repeated here, but what’s worse, they did not even entertain my request for future, let’s say, vigilance. Now, it is common knowledge that journalism as a profession is more or less dead here in the US, but sadly, this applies to technical reviews as well. So my advice to others is to check online customer reviews instead of relying on technical articles that seem to be nothing more than repetition of a given company’s marketing materials.
That would be all for now. I wish all you (fellow) nerds a wonderful Merry Christmas!
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My update: It is January 9, 2023 today. I sent two inquiries to the support asking about the status of my repair. No answer.
Apparently the technician was out sick and since I had sent my emails to his address, nobody read them. I take partial blame for this even though email forwarding has been standard policy just about anywhere for decades. The update I got was that my laptop should be fixed by the end of the week.
-P
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Update: My laptop was shipped back to me today. Apparently, the technicians replaced the whole motherboard, which begs the question whether this repair could have been done by a friendly local hardware shop, as someone suggested. I do not know, but I doubt it. This whole thing strongly suggests a vendor lock-in. I am not happy about that because my warranty will expire soon and I can imagine how much I will have to pay should some other problem occur.
This whole experience made me think about a better solution for the future. Would it be better to buy a cheap Windows laptop and either install Linux double boot or possibly boot a (secure) live system from a thumb drive? Maybe I just got lucky but I have never had these cheap computers fail me. I am writing this on a prehistoric HP tower from Costco running the most recent version of Ubuntu. Sure, this system has a backdoor, but which one doesn’t?
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