ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14: first repair (part 1)
When I purchased ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 slightly more than 3 years ago, I almost immediately paid for extended warranty with premium service. Thus the warranty was extended from 2 years to 3 years. Yet, my laptop needed repair about a month after the warranty expired 😑
I was playing Immortals of Aveum demo. I wanted to check something on the web and so I alt-tabbed. Then bam! Monitor went blank but keyboard lights were still on. There was no sound too. I just did what I usually do: tried force shutdown it by holding down the power button. It took longer than usual to shutdown i.e. about 15 counts but it immediate started back up. It didn't fix the issue though: monitor was still blank with no sound of Windows starting.
Later I discovered that if I unplugged the power cable, I could stop the auto restart after force shutdown it. However, the issue remained. So I decided to bring it to the nearest ASUS service centre i.e. Serveall Low Yat at Plaza Low Yat. Took Grab because Ban was at gym. It was a 32-min ride.
Waited another 10 minutes before I was served. I was told that there would be a RM 100 fee for investigation and later they would provide quotation on the repair for me to accept or not. The problem was that it was almost always the case that data would be lost, due to reformatting, during the investigation. This is puzzling.
All important documents were already appropriately backed-up. I do it at the beginning of each month. As for work, I duplicate it on Google Drive each time I make changes to the files. The only troublesome thing was to reconstruct the 19 days of my personal financial transactions that are documented in a file. The customer service officer suggested that I approach one of the repair shops at the mall (apparently Serveall doesn't offer this service) to pay them to duplicate this file to my portable hard drive before going back to Servall for investigation and repair phases.
Predictable, as soon as I approached a small shop by the lift (I passed by a staff earlier who asked me, "Need repair?"), which I later found out to be Zaini Kilfy Enterprise, and told them what I needed, they offered to investigate the issue within an hour. I took the chance and true to their word, they got back to me 50 minutes later.
When reading the following, please bear in mind that I suspect that their choice of English words was probably imprecise. Hence, I'm blogging this to my best understanding of the situation.
The issue was the motherboard. Repair cost was between RM 450 and 650, depending on the number of components. I knew right then that the final cost would highly likely be RM 650 :D They asked for 2.5 to 3 hours. If this repaired my laptop properly, it was a good deal, at least in term of time, because I suspect I would need to leave my laptop at Serveall at least for a night if I went with them.
It was just before 5pm and so I decided to go home and come back later, hopefully with Ban driving me. I was cooking our dinner that night. Yes, I know it was the start of after-office peak hour but I thought I could make it in an hour or so, cooked dinner, rest and then back to Low Yat. Unexpectedly...
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