What Is the Quality of MSI's Warranty Repair?

Hello All,

I bought a MSI GS70 Stealth back in March of this year, and I have been experiencing severe wireless connectivity issues ever since then. After trying everything and nothing had worked, I contacted MSI and the technician said that I should send the unit back to see if the wireless adapter is defective.

My question is, has anybody tried MSI's warranty repair, and what is the quality of the repair. The reason I asked was because I had an absolute nightmare with Asus's warranty repair and am scarred for life. I had an asus laptop and one small problem, after I send it in, not only did the original problem was not fixed, but the computer was in a worse condition than before I send it in.

I recognize that MSI and Asus are two very different companies, but my experience with warranty repair has been absolutely horrendous that is why I feel that it is necessary to check with the good people on this forum before sending the unit for warranty repair.

I greatly appreciate all the helps, advices, and comments! Thank you all very much!

 

I guess it will depend on the country.

 

Most probably, here the service is done by a general service company that covers the whole Scandinavia and has several service portals in different countries; at least 13 computer brands handle their warranty repairs there. No idea about their quality.

 

I should have clarify. While I think the company's warranty repair reputation and quality as a whole is important, I'm more interested in people's experience with their warranty repair in Southern California, USA because there is where I will get my laptop fixed, if I do chose to get it fix at all!

Thanks a bunch!

 

MSI USA is located in California, and it just so happens that we have an MSI Rep (Geno) right here in the NBR forum. How's that for commitment to service? I would suggest you direct your questions to Geno, and I am betting all your concerns will disappear.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/msi/761676-official-questions-msi-rep.html

,

 

Hey Projectseahorse,

I am the official MSI rep here at notebook review. I work out of the SoCal office, so any RMA issues can easily be checked up and tracked by myself as well as anyone here on my team. We have a great and knowledgeable staff here working on our customers products and always have a fast return time. You can rest easy knowing that if you ever run into issues with your RMA status, you can contact me directly and i will sort it out for you. :thumbsup:

If you have any questions on our RMA process, please feel free to ask me!

Cheers!
Geno

 

I'm guessing the OP has the 7260 wifi card just like in my gt70 and according to numerous users, it is plagued with issues all across different manufacturers. Will there be a recall? I don't see how this card is acceptable. Lenovo sent out a class action settlement lawsuit for a defective intel wifi card, so I'm just wondering if any of us will see any fix or resolution.

 

I'm actually running on killer 1202 n for wireless and 1220 for lan. However, i have been experiencing dropped connections, limited connections, and etc. Driver updates have proved to be ineffective, along with all the other possible solutions I found on Google. It is extremely frustrating!

 

I'm in the same boat as the OP. For the last several days, I have been experiencing lag/stuttering on my GS60 Ghost Pro 3K, which I thought was limited to just video watching (YouTube, HBOGO, etc). But I noticed it also when playing games like SWTOR. And it was getting progressively worse. Despite serious scrutiny using the task manager and monitoring the processes for any sudden jumps/spikes/drops, I just couldn't pinpoint anything.
Is it memory? Is it disk activity? Is it network connection?
Nothing looked out of the ordinary.
Then one day after a reboot, all I was presented with was a black screen. It wouldn't even POST. Several hard reboots, with no other changes in between got the system to come back up. Very strange.
Then after being frustrated yesterday by trying to watch HBOGO without any frame drops, I decided to do another reboot. Same black screen issue. No POST.
After several more hard reboots with the same result, I tried to get into BIOS to see if even that would come up, and if so, that would rule out the screen being the problem. I had to do several more reboots and finally BIOS came up.
Ok, so it's clearly not a "screen" issue. The screen works find in BIOS.
I made absolutely no changes to BIOS, just saved and exited to a restart. This time, I timed the OS launch. 1 minute 38 seconds from boot to OS load. Not very good for an M2 SSD system. And far less than the ~20 second time that I was used to when I first got the machine.
But since the OS did manage to load, I restarted again to test the problem. The system booted up, but this time took over 3 minutes to load the OS.
One more restart and this was where the lappy just gave up. No amount of hard reboots would get it to even POST. Couldn't even boot into BIOS.

No choice but to RMA. Now, this is particularly problematic for me because believe it or not, I mainly use this lappy for work. I'm in the online video industry and I have to use something powerful for video (and can't stand Apple's proprietary bs). Before boxing it up, I had to remove the drives (which is no small task) before sending the lappy in to MSI because some of my customers have sensitive video data which are either HIPAA compliant and/or under strong legal NDA.

So this puts me in a serious bind. How am I supposed to work with just my phone for internet? 0_o
I asked if there was any prioritization for RMAs and was pretty much told, when we get to it, we'll get to it.
All 10-15+ business days of it (two to THREE work weeks!).

This is very much not the experience that I'm used to, especially coming from being a Dell/Alienware user for so many years (this is my first non-Alienware laptop...ever) and having their accidental care and extended services. And I do realize that you get what you pay for (the cost of an Alienware vs the cost of an MSI is about double), but I'm taking a real gamble here with MSI and the experience has already left a bad taste in my mouth. And the package hasn't even been loaded on the truck to be sent to them yet.

= /

 

Update:

Submitted RMA - 11/11

Shipped to MSI - 11/12

Received at MSI - 11/15

Shipped from MSI - 11/18

Received - 11/21

According to the packing slip, it looks like they did a motherboard replacement. After reinstalling my drives (the HDD and SSDs), I had a few hiccups with Windows (8.1). I think it was just freaking out because of the new hardware not matching what the drives were originally configured to. I was prompted for a few "repairs" before Windows would actually boot. After a couple of restarts (with the same "repair" prompts), the system booted up nice and quickly, back to its working state. Looks ok so far, though I think I might not have fully plugged the left fan back in because I can only hear the right side spinning. So I'll be opening it back up over the holiday and checking on that.

Anyway, so far, my experience with MSI's turnaround has been acceptable and faster than anticipated.

 

In my experience the RMA service itself is great but that means nothing when I have to keep sending it back for serious issues on a 4 month old laptop (first was for a motherboard and cable problem and now just a month later it's back with them for a faulty fan). The first time I didn't have to pay for shipping because there was also an issue with the SSD the reseller put in so they took care of that. But this time around I'm down $50 since MSI doesn't pay for shipping even for warranty repairs which is ridiculous, especially in instances like mine when the product is only a few months old. Sigh...

Edit: Oops, forgot to talk about turn around time! My first RMA they fixed everything and shipped it back in one day (well, to the reseller who had it sitting around for 2 weeks but that's another story). Supposedly this second RMA should be quick too. That's nice and all but even if they have a turn around time of an hour, it definitely doesn't make up for selling me an inferior product to begin with.

 

If this is a repeated RMA usually they would cover the return shipping.
Did you also go through the reseller too?

 

The MSi support center near Vancouver/Richmond Canada is absolute garbage. They had my MSi GT60 for nearly 5 weeks trying to fix a VGA error. Not only did they not fix it (I managed to reproduce this error within 30 minutes of receiving it back 5 weeks later), they also forgot to put my custom wireless card Intel AC7260 back in and had to take another week to receive that in a separate package. The service took so long that even Ken from GentechPC was angry at MSi and had to follow up several times with the MSi support center in California. I bought the notebook mid-september of 2013 and used it for about a week before I RMA'd it and shipped it to Van. I received it back in early November and after 5 weeks it still remained broken. A week later I was told to send it to the support center in Toronto and due to the holiday season they couldn't get a refurbished model out until Jan 2014 which was when I finally received a working model.

End result: Paid 2800CAD in September 2013 for a refurbished model that arrived in Jan 2014.

If you plan on buying an MSi, I strongly recommend you buy it at a local hardware store and benchmark the crap out of it in the first week so you can return it if there are any problems.

 

Yup, he had to pull some strings, but your system is all good now.
Once the issue is resolved then they should be good for a long time.

 

Did he? Yikes. I felt that Ken was pretty annoyed at MSi talking with him over the phone and he was more than understanding about the situation. Yeah the 5 weeks felt even longer since I had 0 updates from MSi about what they were doing or what they were waiting for. Glad Ken was there to find out what was happening on my behalf. The center over in Toronto was very communicative, at least the person that was assigned to me, I think James was his name. I kinda feel bad for Gentech and in a way for James and Warner (?) since they had to inherit a pretty bad mess from Vancouver. All parties involved were very helpful except the black hole that is the Vancouver/Richmond MSi.

 

The quality has been good for motherboards. The laptop I sent in is on its way back now. In my case, they fixed it at the lower end of their quoted window for laptop repairs. That was pretty good considering they were doing their end of year closeouts in their system and I had a holiday weekend thrown in there.

I like that MSI is generous on their warranty where you can upgrade some components without it killing the warranty. I've added a SSD and upgraded the WiFi twice. That would have voided the warranty in most places, so I'm quite happy they were still willing to fix it without a problem.

I should have it back on Monday, so I'll report back if all's working well.

 

Nope, didn't go through the reseller this time.

 

I got my GT60 back today. I must say, I am impressed with MSI's repair service.

The last Asus I sent back was ended up with a repair that was pretty half-@--ed. Yeah, it worked for a little while, but I started having problems again shortly thereafter. Even now, it's still not quite right.

MSI on the other hand, pretty much overhauled my machine. New CPU, new mobo, new cabling on the inside. Plus they cleaned it up and updated the bios. It's running like a champ.

It was returned in the same packaging I sent, which was a well-cushioned FedEx laptop box. The service ticket was placed on the outside as well so I didn't even have to open it up to know what they did.

Overall, it was a very good experience. Makes me more confident to buy MSI in the future.

Super