Today, eMachines finally decided to roll out a new BIOS for this M6805 laptop that Meghan bought in July 2004. The purpose of said BIOS? To provide compatibility with Windows XP Service Pack 2. About fucking time, I’d say.
When we finally got a replacement unit for the first one, which had a defect in the audio system causing the left speaker to crackle loudly, the first thing I did to it was upgrade to SP2, and voila, suddenly it would lock up cold whenever I unplugged or plugged it back in. Naturally, I troubleshot the hell out of it, and scoured the web for solutions. The company’s online support was completely useless, nary a support bulletin to be found anywhere on eMachines website.
After fiddling with it for several days, I called tech support and they were all like, “yeah, there’s a known issue with SP2 and that unit, so you should uninstall SP2 until further notice.” Nice.
So finally, today, after about 6 months, they pump out a new BIOS, complete with nifty Windows Flasher utility, to fix it. It works. Yay. I’d still have to recommend avoiding eMachines in the future though. I thought I’d give them a try because the value was there, but in the end I think we’d have been better off with a Compaq, hp, or basically any name but Dell. Don’t get me wrong; I have no problems with the overall performance of this machine, but the customer service and support is more or less terrible, and there were a few flaws, as I’ve experienced. One likley a manufacturing defect and the other a design flaw. Should have been a recall.
Posted by Ron in Computers