[Amilo A] Dissapointment with Fujitsu-Siemens

[Audioslave]

Hello all

I purchased a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A 1667G in December 2005, with a 1 year warranty (non-extendable). I must say i am very dissapointed with the overall quality of Fujitsu-Siemens' computers. Not only that my motherboard failed after only 2 months, but it stayed in service for ~1 month. They first called me after 2 weeks, claiming they fixed it. It was not fixed at all.

One month after the warranty expired, my screen stopped working. Maybe that's the reason why there was no warranty extension available for this series of laptops.

Also, a friend of mine who has an Amilo D series laptop, and his MB stopped working 2 months after purchase.

I am sorry, but i have to take measures against this and make sure nobody else buys your notebooks. I will post on computer related forums and shopping sites to complain about the quality of your laptops and customer service.

[Joovilhar]

I am inclined to agree. I have generally found Fujitsu-Siemens to be ... unhelpful. I was fortunate enough to buy an extended warranty for my notebook (3 years on-site, which in itself was a devil to find) - but it was worth every penny. One system board replacement, one screen replacement, and the DVD writer just gave up the ghost - barely 15 months into ownership. Doesn't exactly scream "quality" at you, does it?

Plus, trying to actually BUY a laptop with the specifications you want seems to be like trying to get blood out of a stone. FSC seem incapable of even marketing a full product range on their own shop! Frustrating, in the extreme.

I feel for you, but I think Fujitsu-Siemens' own ineptitude at pre-sales marketing will have a bigger effect than your campaign, and they will cease making notebooks, sooner or later (the dealer I bought from said they were going to stop stocking FSC stuff soon, as people just weren't buying them). Probably for the best, but I have to admit that I liked the keyboard on my S7020D...

It's just a pity Lenovo bought IBM's laptop division - one of those would have been the first on my list if IBM still made them. I guess I'll be looking at the likes of Asus and Toshiba for my next notebook, as FSC look like they're becoming less suitable as each day passes. I'm going to visit their stand at CeBIT on Sunday, but I don't have high expectations.

[marcus i]

i agree with your comment on fsc. My laptops graphic card gave up merely a month out of warranty - am currently trying to force them to fix it for free and they certainly should since their build quality is so poor

[andy88]

I agree with you, our laptops arent as well built as they used to be. I think the Lifebook S6120 was probably the best laptop we ever made, it was so well built. The Lifebook S7010 laptops onwards are just poor though, the plastics are too flimsy. We see a lot of people picking them up and holding them by the corner of the laptop, where the PCMCIA slots are, and the case will flex which cracks the motherboard.

However...

my motherboard failed after only 2 months

One month after the warranty expired, my screen stopped working

his MB stopped working 2 months after purchase

These components won't just break on thier own. I can only guess but I assume you were using your machine for gaming? If so, people don't seem to realise that laptops aren't meant for 3d gaming, processing heavy loads for longer periods of time. Quite often there's just not enough airflow to keep all the components cool, and sooner or later one of them will get too hot and cause some damage.

With your screen - again I can only guess but I assume it was a problem with the screen power / video cable, or the connection to the mainboard rather than the screen itself? Again, these things don't just break on thier own. Did you ever slam the lid shut or anything like that, place things on the laptop etc?

If you could give me the serial number of your machine I can try and find the repair history and see what exactly was done to it. You say that you sent it in to be repaired but it wasn't fixed when it came back? I don't know about the consumer machines but when we send Lifebooks off for repair they always come back with a http://www.pc-doctor.com/ printout report confirming that all the various components are working. I can't imagine repair centers not testing consumer machines before they're sent back to the customer...

FSC seem incapable of even marketing a full product range on their own shop!

We do the exact opposite of Dell I believe - we don't sell directly to customers, we only sell to the channel who then resell them to customers. I imagine the "official" shop is run by another company that resells our kit.

Anyway Audioslave, as I say if you let me know the serial no (12 digit 4 letters 8 numbers) of your machine I can check out what happened to it if you like. (Cool name by the way, shame about them splitting up but hopefully rage will start touring again this year, would love to see them live)

Andy

[Audioslave]

Hi andy!

If laptops were not meant to be user with 3d games, why on earth do you equip them with powerful video cards? And why don't you write down in large letters "playing 3d games on this laptop can seriously affect it's components"?

Anyway, the story is like this: 2 months after purchase, the cooler failed. It went into service, but when it came back they service company (affiliated with FS) didn't issue a list of things replaced. I didn't know about it at the time, but there's a law here and they didn't respect that. Also, as the laptop is a product that comes with "whole" warranty (the warranty is for the entire laptop, not for separate components) they should have placed a seal on it, to prevent me from messing with it. There goes another law braking.

Also, after my warranty expired, and my display failed, i wrote a complaint to the service company, asking them to provide a list of all things changed in my laptop. They first refused (that's against the law), then they refused to file my complaint (also against the law). After many attempts, they said they only reinstalled my windows in order to fix that cooler failure.

After complaining to FS in Romania, they finally said that they replaced the motherboard.

The only problem is: after my monitor failed, i took it to an authorised service, and said they found incredible things: there are screwdrivers marks on the motherboard, on the subwoofer, and my display failed because the power supply was supplying 12V instead of 3.3V to the monitor. The service company did all that, and I intend to sue them.

Also, FS should really watch out for those companies that represent them. The service company in my country is known to be doing a sloppy work and everybody is pissed at them.

I would like to appologise to FS. It's not their fault, it's the service companies. FS in Romania and Austria replied within 12 hours and they were more than willing to help me.

[andy88]

Hi,

Yeah I don't see why we produce laptops with really powerful components, if I was designing a laptop I'd make it as small and light as possible with the longest battery life. But I guess people will buy them, so we sell them.

Regarding your situation - I would definately go ahead with any legal action you decide, as it sounds like that repair company is well out of order. I don't know about things being against the law (at least here in the UK) but they should certainly have complied with any requests you have as a customer. "they said they only reinstalled my windows in order to fix that cooler failure" - ...I imagine they're either quite stupid or just incompetent at repairing computers... the screwdriver marks sound bad, they could have been an accident, everyone makes mistakes after all, but they should have replaced the damaged components before sending it back to the customer... sending the wrong voltage to the display is just stupid, there is no way that could be an honest mistake, they sound seriously incapable of doing thier jobs.

When you complained to FS Romania, did you speak to the support helpdesk or customer services? I would suggest speaking to someone in customer services and telling them everything you said in your post - I wouldn't start demanding refunds etc like a typical annoyed customer, but see if you can discuss with them about what can be done about this. This might be difficult as you're a single customer with one machine rather than a business with multiple servers, laptops etc, a more valued customer. But if enough people call customer services and compain FS Romania might re-think thier relationship with some of thier repair companies. I'd be interested to hear how this all finishes.

I would like to appologise to FS. It's not their fault, it's the service companies. FS in Romania and Austria replied within 12 hours and they were more than willing to help me.

Thanks. A lot of people don't realise that a lot of work is outsourced and contracted out, unfortunately this sometimes tends to affect the quality of the repairs etc as a lot of the time all we can do is phone a repair company and moan at them to hurry up. If I was running the whole thing I'd spend the time and money employing people to do repairs internally. But never mind. I can understand why you would blame FSC for this, after all it is one of our products and we should take care of repairs etc. I guess it's all about costs, using third party companies for repairs is obviously cheaper I imagine.

Anyway. Good luck with this whole thing

Cheers

Andy

[Audioslave]

Hi again, andy!

If you could give me the serial number of your machine I can try and find the repair history and see what exactly was done to it.

Here are all the s/n written on it: YSAE010006; LKN:RUM-178200-001, OEM:AMILO_A BS016 AP016; SZXF2000-53602215 .

Do tell me what you find


And andy: Thanks man!

[andy88]

Hi,

YSAE010006 was the bit I needed, thanks. However:

YSAE010006 - repair history of the last 90 days
- - - No information available for the selected period. - - -

The product database I have access to only appears to have records for the last 90 days, and apparently there's no information avalable for that period for your machine. There might be some more information on another system the "real" helpdesk uses, but as I work on the internal (staff support) helpdesk I don't have access to that, sorry. If you call the helpdesk or customer support they might be able to give you this information.

Cheers

Andy

[Audioslave]

Hey andy

can you please give me an email address for the customer service in UK? i really want to see what was changed in my computer, since here no one can tell me...

[andy88]

I'm not sure but I assume it's either customer.support@fujitsu-siemens.com or technical.support@fujitsu-siemens.com

Cheers

Andy

[Lavrinenko]

I'm not sure but I assume it's either customer.support@fujitsu-siemens.com or technical.support@fujitsu-siemens.com

Cheers

Andy

Hello Andy,

my post is a bit offtopic in this thread, but anyway: can you please answer "is there any solution for 3438G fan and vista ?" topic just below in this forum? I've sent letter to technical.support email, but still the letter not even read/received (I've requested delivery status message).

Thanks in advance.

[carter]

I'm also thoroughly disappointed not only in my Amilo M 1425 notebook itself, but FSC customer support.

I bought my notebook in January 2005, from Media Markt, while I was living in Berlin. Below is a summary of the problems I've experienced.

1. Keyboard was a bit loose, causing an annoying clack whenever I pressed keys in the top left region of the keyboard. I solved this by removing the keyboard and repositioning a "QC" sticker (ha!) to provide some padding.

2. While trying to play Half Life 2, it became apparent that the shipped graphics drivers and those on FSC website were way out of date. Since official ATI drivers wouldn't install, I resorted to using "Omega" unofficial ATI drivers, and still use them to this date.

3. When I returned to my home country, New Zealand, about 6 months later, I started to notice the integrated ethernet would occasionally just mysteriously stop receiving data. Putting it down to a hardware fault, I tried to arrange warranty repairs in NZ. Too bad, the warranty was not global (like some other companies, such as Hewlett Packard). I resorted to buying a D-Link PCMCIA network card as a workaround.

4. When burning CDs and DVDs, the system always ran very slowly. After closer inspection, I found that the drive was running in PIO mode, and apparently didn't want to run in UDMA mode. I eventually found third party unofficial firmware for the NEC drive, and after installing that, the drive was able to operate in UDMA mode. This made the system responsive enough that I could actually do other things while burning a CD.

5. CDs that I burn are not always compatible in other drives. Usually they get read errors close to the 350MB marker. Smaller amounts of data are fine. DVDROMs that I burn are also fine, regardless of size. To be fair, this may be related to #4 above, but I think it was a pre-existing problem.

6. This is the one that annoys me the most. After recently installing Ubuntu Linux 7.04, which includes kernel 2.6.20, the CPU frequency/voltage scaling stopped working. The Dothan core of my Pentium M 1.6GHz has never been officially supported by the speedstep-centrino driver in Linux, but it was working up to 2.6.17. Kernel developers deprecated some code in 2.6.18, but this was not supposed to cause any breakage, since it should have been possible to use ACPI to determine the supported P-states of the processor.... well, maybe if the ACPI support wasn't buggy. There is an out of tree patch available, that has freq/voltage tables for the Dothan cores, which I'm about to try out, but this got me thinking - what if Windows is not scaling the CPU frequency either? I downloaded a tool called NHC (Notebook Hardware Control) from http://www.pbus-167.com, and enabled processor freq scaling. I ran a CPU intensive benchmark and noted the results. I then rebooted without NHC, ie, let Windows XP handle the freq scaling, and re-ran the benchmark. The results were about 33% of the previous run. Without NHC, the CPU would apparently never run faster than 600MHz, even though it was capable of bursting to 1.6GHz when under load.

So it appears that Windows XP can't figure out the P-states of the processor either, due to what I suspect is a buggy BIOS and/or ACPI implementation. I'm really angry to think that for nearly two years, this laptop has been running at about 1/3 the speed it's capable of. All because FSC won't get off their bum and update the BIOS.

My next laptop will certainly not be a Fujitsu Siemens.

[pako]

Hi!
I had M1425 and it worked just fine. Very fine. With latest BIOS and drivers propperly updated from vendors (not FSC) sites. No problems at all.

Thus I decided to buy a new FSC laptop, namely Xi 1554. Unfortunately, the new machine is broken - I had random crashes adn black screen freezes etc. After few weeks of trying to figure out what is wrong, I got to FSC service (trying to avoid resellers service as they are obviously not competent). Guys at service spent some time and concluded that the problem is with cooling system, CPU cooling pine, which looks like is not transmiting the heat from CPU to cooler. I looks like logical explanation of the behavior even proven by self inspection where I found that CPU is very hot and the pipe is cold few cms from CPU.

OK, up to that point I was not so dissapointed by FSC expect tht my good attitude is shaken as obviously FSC Quality Control is such that they would be fired immedietely in my company!

But them next issue arised. The guys in service have struggled 2 hours to get latest service database to identify the part no. of the cooler!!! It looks like the latest service databases do not include XI 1554 (other XIs are there)!!! Strange, very strange that most powerful model which is 2-3 months on the market is not included. Ah, yes, when they finaly found it, they discovered that officialy Xi 1554 has 4 (four!!!) different cooler systems specified. It clearly indicates that FSC is lounched Xi 1554 in the rush, without proper testing and without final design proven to work in harsh conditions - for which this model is marketed (Extreme...).

So, I must say that FSC is not behaving as they were 2 years ago. I would still like that FSC investigate it's business policy and improve not only QC but also the servicing support including also much work on BISO updates (small suggestion: include more customizable options in BIOS for Xi and other "home" and "extreme" models as these models are mainly used by the people who knows what to do with advanced options).

[RingOfFire]

I've bought LifeBook S7010 and paid a good sum (USD 2500) for it 2 years back. I've observed the following :

Performance of a Turtle

Poor LCD quality, and I have 1 dead pixel now. I do not know if they will repair.. I still have 3 years of warranty..

Looks (and it really is) cheap and fragile, quality lacks on overall components.

Only good part is may be the CPU (1,80Ghz) but can it work at that speed? who knows; it does not give me this feeling...I have only XP Pro and Ms OFfice 2003 pro and it takes 5-7 minutes from boot to "usable state"! how "sweet"....

Year 2007, and still no updates available from Web site of FSC for any components: still using drivers which are dated 2001 or 2003. Are these drivers so perfect that they see nothing to improve? blah..

I'd better have bought a very cheap "noname" laptop which should have cost me 600 or 700 dollars and I would not have felt any regret.... I'll go with the Lenovo, the next time...

[pako]

I'm also very disapointed by FSC. Including the fact that [u][b]xi 1554 is NOT a FSC design[/b][/u] at all!!!! They just branded it from some Chinese manufacturer! Thus, it is full of "holes"... What a cheat. We are paying for "brand" quality and we are receiving a device that even is not produced by FSC. No supprise that they are not able not willing to support it...