Motherboard Life Expectancy

MostlyLurks

Hi all,

I bought a laptop with PC sepcialist.co.uk 1.5 years ago. A couple of weeks ago it would not turn on I sent it back to them.
They said the motherboard had failed and it would cost 117 sterling to repair because I was out of warranty.

I then later heard about the 2 year EU coverage (I cant post links but if you google "Product guarantees for consumers eur-lex") it is first link)

I got on to the eccireland and they basically told me I have to prove that is was faulty at the time of sale.

So I was wondering does anyone either have a link to general life expectancy or a motherboard or any idea how I could prove that it has to have been faulty from the start?

Fysh

The reason you have to provide proof it was faulty from the start is because your purchase was from a UK based seller before October 2015. This means you are bound by the 1984 Sale of Goods Act in the UK, under which you can have the right to warranty-type support from the retailer (not the manufacturer) for up to 6 years - but after 6 months you are required to provide proof of some kind that that the fault is due to a design failure. Edit: - this link might be helpful.

The Act does not specify what such proof would look like, which makes things somewhat unhelpful. You'll need to know more detail about the failure itself - does the motherboard reach POST? Does it return any specific error codes when doing so? Have components such as the RAM and CPU been tested and verified as working?

You'd also want to know the specific make and model of motherboard so that you can check the manufacturer's site to see if there have been any recalls or product update announcements made (sometimes a firmware update might be released to prevent hardware failures, though this is comparatively rare). You can also check whether there are substantial numbers of people complaining about that model on forums, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Personally I would argue that 1.5 years is an unreasonably short lifespan for a primary component in a custom-build laptop - but under the law as it stands you need to provide some evidence that the failure is due to a fault present at the time of sale. One thing you can do if they've looked at it is ask them to confirm that they do not see any sign of accidental damage or similar; it helps your case if you have confirmation that it's not down to you doing anything incorrectly or performing inadequate maintenance. But by itself, that wouldn't be enough...

If you can't get them to fix it under warranty (and I wouldn't bet that it'll happen, TBH) you should consider your options - the standard warranty from PCSpecialist appears to provide 3 years of labour, but only 1 year of parts. So while you can probably get them to send it back to you for free if you don't get them to repair it, you'll almost certainly pay more to get it fixed elsewhere - the motherboard price won't be likely to be much cheaper than what they've quoted and you'll be paying at a guess at least €60 on top of that for installation (probably more, depending how fiddly it is to disassemble and reassemble the laptop).

MostlyLurks

Thanks Fysh for all the info.
Yes I still get labour free and they have offered to take it back again with no charge (although I did pay for the first return to check)
I'll look into all you have suggested (but I think I will go local next time...)