All the main PC manufacturers sell laptops through their international or India-focussed websites. Many of them frown up on sales made on e-com sites such as Flipkart and Amazon. Some of them say that those laptops purchased on e-com sites will not get official after-sales and warranty support. Yet, these sites continue to sell huge number of PCs every day.
My laptop is over a decade old and I decide to buy a new one. I bought a laptop from a well-known Taiwanese manufacturer from their official website. Like other laptop manufacturers, this one also makes the laptops in China. In fact, most PC manufacturers do not manufacture laptops. All laptops are made by OEM contractors such as Pegatron and Foxconn. These OEMs also design laptops based on requirements given by the ‘PC manufacturer’.
My AMD laptop cost around ₹30,000. The reason that I chose this model was because the description said that the laptop had 8GB RAM that could be expanded to 32GB. It also had a 512 GB nVME disk that could be replaced with a 1TB disk, easily addressing future needs.
The laptop came with Windows. I had no use for it so I installed Linux. After installing Linux, I created a new desktop panel and dragged the battery indicator applet to it. Upon checking, I found that the the battery was referring to itself as "AMD battery" with serial ID 123456789. The applet showed that the battery was only 26 watt-hours, instead of the advertised 55 watt-hours. I then logged into Windows and ran the BatterView applet. It confirmed the findings in Linux OS.
Shocked, I assumed that the courier guys had swapped the original battery with a fake one. So, I opened the back panel and checked the internals. The battery was not made by AMD. Duh! The cheap battery manufacturer was masquerading as AMD. They had been asked to provide a battery so cheap that it was not worth putting their OEM signature to the battery firmware.
I sent a mail to the PC manufacturer saying that I had lost my trust in them and they should refund me the cost of the laptop. They wanted to first connect to the laptop by remote so I suggested that I take the laptop to the nearest authorized service center.
The service center personnel noted that the back panel seal was broken and declared that the warranty was void. I said I did not care about the after-sales service but I expected them to provide with a laptop with genuine parts. They insisted that the battery was genuine but that they could not take the laptop back because I had opened the laptop. The PC support personnel said over the phone that if I wanted to get just the battery replaced, I needed to pay for it and labour charge. They mentioned this orally. In the emails, they never mentioned anything.
I asked the service center personnel to take screenshots and photos of the BatteryInfoView findings and mention it in their report.
Back home, I sent an email to the PC manufacturer saying that if I did not get my money back in three days, I will approach the consumer forum in my state. They called and refunded the money.
Now, I am in the market for a new PC but I am afraid buy one. My old laptop lacks several keys. I have replaced its screen and keyboard once already. I do not know what to do.
Windows 11 review
This was the first time I used Windows 11. I've read very bad things about it. I was not going to use it but it was there. As soon as I logged in, McAfee trial version complained that it needs to be updated. It could not update because the trial had expired. I did not want to buy McAfee so I decided to uninstall. There is no uninstall option. I had to buy McAfee to have the privilege of uninstalling it. They had provided a program on their site to uninstall such OEM trial versions. I tried to download it using Firefox but no program except Edge browser would connect to the Internet. To run the uninstaller, I had to use the 'Super Administrator' mode. This is a level above Administrator and you have to log out to login as Super Administrator. Clearly, this is over-engineering. Maybe that's how unsafe Windows is. Microsoft Windows is strictly an operating system for morons! Even with the fast CPU, the McAfee uninstaller took half an hour to uninstall the trial. Crappy OS gets crappy software vendors. Windows developers are really the worst. Their dog-eat-dog corporate culture is toxic with soul-crushing 'stack rating' system, meetings about meetings about meetings, woke-moron attitudes/politics and a vindictive management to top it all.
In Linux, I noted that Firefox was very fast even with a dozen tabs of Youtube videos. All video downloads finished as soon as I started them. I desperately need a new PC but sinister forces are against it. With mobile phones, it is the battery that becomes obsolete first. With my old laptop, I had replaced the screen once and the keyboard twice. Several keys are damaged and unusable. The battery has smart calibration (it never charges upto 100% or goes down to 20% or something like that) so the cycles and wear level are as good as new. I guess I am stuck with it.