Pc/laptop Help

[Fish-Finger-er]

right august 06 i purchased a laptop for the princly sum of £1100. its an asus by the way.

soon after gettin it, the ethernet port, tv out, s video etc stopped working, but this didnt bother me, seeing as i didnt use them.

the cd drive then went a bit iffy, it works, but not all the time.(i.e sometimes it wont detect theres a disc in there)

then about 3.5 months ago, after a pretty hefty sesh on cs. the wifi/bluettooh console auto switched form wireless+ bluetooth, to bluetooth only, so i tried flickin it back(tabs between 3 settings in one direction only) to no wifi/no bluetooth, and then onto bluetooth+ wifi again, which it just got stuck on no wifi/no bluetooth.

tried pissin round with it, couldnt get it to work, but was desperate for the net, so just went and grabbed a usb wifi dongle and used that for a bit.

then about 3 weeks ago, the whole pc just froze up, screen stayed as it was, couldnt do anything, turned it off, and since then, itll turn on, but a black screen only, nothing else at all. no bios/boot screen/no manufacturer screen. just here the drive spinning up, leds come on etc. and nothing more. stays like that till you hold the power button down for 6 seconds to turn it off.

now its got 2 years RTB warranty.

1) will they charge me for collection + delivery

2) will they repair all the stuff above for free, or will they get out of it saying its wear and tear/user abuse.

3) will they go sniffing through my HD, and if so is there any legal consequences for me from it. or are they not allowed to do it.

basically, ill be honest here.

theres a large collection of d/l'd music on there (but then i guess there is on every pc they repair)

theres a few dl'd films on there.(and then about 100 more that have been on there, and then moved to external storage/deleted, if that makes any odds when they go through records)

neither of which im too arsed about. but.....

theres what i should imagine to be a large quantity of illegal programs on their.

photoshop cs2

possibly macromedia mx studio, although i cant remember on that one( i have it on disc here, so one would think i had it on the pc, but never used it if i did have)

photomatix 2.5

lightroom

then a few other programs like poweriso, daemontools and the like.

now are they likely to refuse to fix it due to having pirate software on there, or worse, are they likely to pass an image of my Hd, or details of the programs on it to the police.

also.

my phone(s) where synced with laptop

and my msn convos where saved.

now if you where to go through my phone, and my msn convo logs, you could probably find out a fair bit of information about me taking class A drugs(not an issue,unless mother finds out, nothing can be proved) but also with my phone being synced, theres a fair few shady people on my phone, with messages between me and them probably synced, which could possibly help pin them with a dealing charge, or at least stick the police on their trail if the info was passed over to them.

can they legally look at what i keep on my hard drive, and if so, can they legally pass the information onto the police, and if they did, is their much chance of them doing anything?

[Boswell]

I'm pritty sure they are allowed to pass on information on about illegal software but I don't think they are allowed to pass on your private conversations.

[Fish-Finger-er]

I'm pritty sure they are allowed to pass on information on about illegal software but I don't think they are allowed to pass on your private conversations.

yea expected something similar, as i say the films and music im not too bothered about, as they got no proof whether i do have the music at home/how i obtained it.

again with the programs, its not like ive got loads of iso/downloaded rars of files, and keygens on the pc, will they be able to tell that my keygenned up cs2 was keygenned? or will it just look genuine

[tomturd]

Back up all your stuff onto an external drive either way. (You'd have to do this anyway as theres a good chance they'd format your hard drive).

Have you not got a restore CD? It could be a driver problem, in which case restoring it would fix it.

[MadManMike]

As Tom said, get all the vitals off it, format it and send it off

Even change the hard drive if you're really cautious.

[Fish-Finger-er]

Back up all your stuff onto an external drive either way. (You'd have to do this anyway as theres a good chance they'd format your hard drive).

Have you not got a restore CD? It could be a driver problem, in which case restoring it would fix it.

yea ive backed up everything important(except camera pics), i do it any way twice a month. so i only lost 10 days worth of info(and 3500 photos from 6 months)

but... the pc wont turn on atm, i cant get it into windows, or a boot menu or anything, it turns on as much as the lights and leds come on, the drives spin, but noooooo display. meaning i cant get on there and delete anything that i shouldnt have, and likewise cant restore the system to its original configuration.

[Tomm]

I wouldn't worry about it unless you've got kiddie porn on there.

By the way - RTB means return to base so it's your responsibility to get it to them and back from them. So yeah, I think you'll pay delivery. The good news is that it should definitely all be covered by the warranty.

[Fish-Finger-er]

As Tom said, get all the vitals off it, format it and send it off

Even change the hard drive if you're really cautious.

cant get on it to get stuff of it, not arsed about what ive lost, cant format it as i cant get on it.

and if i change the hd, i lose the warranty, otherwise id of done it.

ah, mike, do you do laptop repair, or just pc repair/building??

just curious as to how much a laptop generally costs to repair, say it needed a new ports installing down the one side(ethernet, s video, tv out) a new built in wifi adapter installing?

not going to ask on the black screen as i got no idea what it is, at all.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you've got kiddie porn on there.

does joshs post in the post a pic of your missus thread count, may be cookies or temp files left from that

so you dont reckon theyll be arsed that i got cs2 etc on there?

[MadManMike]

ah, mike, do you do laptop repair, or just pc repair/building??

I do, but depending on what parts are needed it could be quite expensive - Laptop parts tend to cost more than PC bits too.

You're better off sending it to them because other than carriage costs it'll be free

If it won't even come on, there could be several different things wrong with it so troubleshooting could be costly (ie changing bits that maybe you didn't need to change...)

[JoeM]

I've sent my laptop back and i had limewire pro (over 700 tracks downloaded), photoshop cs2 (i used the crack off youtube for that), loads of downloaded movies and other stuff. They didn't say anything. But then again i had it fixed locally from a small shop. Not sure what a big one will say.

[James Quigley]

If it helps my local shop near me (about 3 years ago) had to put a new HDD in my comp and even put an illegal copy of xp Pro on it for me.

I had xp pro on the old HDD and they asked if It was genuine, I said no, they went okay cool, we'll put it on the new HDD for you then.

I'd like to point out that I'm now on a fully genuine, paid for out of my own pocket, xp home

[Krisboats]

I wouldn't worry too much about them finding cs2 and stuff as being fake. It'd mean they'll have to trawl through your computer checking registration codes and sending them off to manufacturers to see if they're legit. Its a lot of hassle and i'm sure they'll just wipe your drive back to standard retail and try to find what the problem is from there. They'll probably fit a new hard drive and see if they can get it running from that, if they fix it they'll try it with yours in... if still no luck it'll most likely get wiped.

I don't know for sure but i'm fairly sure they won't go checking everything.

[JonMack]

I took mine into an official apple reseller to get repaired and it had very little legal software on it, if any, anyway, they said nothing.

[poopipe]

I took mine into an official apple reseller to get repaired and it had very little legal software on it, if any, anyway, they said nothing.

they don't check apples for naughty stuff - everybody knows that nonces only use windows

[spode@thinkbikes]

Don't bother trying to get it privately repaired. Small stuff is repairable by hand - but yours sounds like a large fault. All that stuff going run generally means the motherboard is screwed. Which is an expensive and fiddly repair.

Your 2 year warranty is there for a reason. Shipping it won't cost too much either. Generally, if you pay for shipping TO them (use something like parcel2go.com) they pay for shipping it back to you.