Dear Sirs,
I let you know that I will spend the rest of my life telling everyone how badly ASUS ripped me off in this "warranty repair" case in 2024/25.
its a good story.
Because I started computing at MIT before i18n I need an US intl keyboard on my computers.
But nobody wants to sell me that keyboard in Europe.
So I had to find a friend, traveling the US to get me an american issued UX8406MA just for the keyboard.
This all happend while I had a femur head necrosis and was under a lot of pain.
But all good, the device arrived just in time to make my hospital stay nicer.
Since i didn't use the Duo screen much i didn't notice that the duo display started to flicker after a while with stripes, clearly some pin related issue. I managed to report this in only in October
and started a support case Notebook UX8406MA; ASUS Service No=E24100005254
But since i was working with the device a lot, there was no good slot to give it away, until Xmas....
So I eventually managed to send it to the service center on January 7. (RMA PLB4T10567)
It took them 2 weeks to tell me, that they changed my warranty case into a charge repair based on a CID case.
A defect from October and the device functional up to January showing only display glitches does not support this assessment. There is no logic or provable causability to find in here.
They created the charge case PLB4T10567 on the base of 2 completely unclear non-conclusive "proof" pictures in the charge.rma site with a not convincing explanation other than there was some corrosion.
Well, the system was working fine so what? This was not what the repair request (from October) was about!!
(Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared to deal with such malevolence and did not copy those images to my drive immediately. Obviously, with this attitude I cannot access them anymore!)
When I got the system back, the SSD has been blanked. OK. But when I tried to reinstall the system image from before using a win11PE installation media I had, the restore did not find the internal SSD until i disabled the VMD driver in the BIOS so the win11RE could transfer the image.
After the image reload I had to reset that bios settting (VMD drivers) to make it bootable again.
(I suppose installing the VMD drivers with the Win11PE would have worked as well, but they were hard to find. Not on my zenbook duo product support page e.g.)
I know now that I can never again buy an ASUS product, because the service level was on a level of extortion.
As a senior IT professional (last project working as platform architect for the WHO deploying their certification server in to Azure) such a service level is unacceptable. almost below zero.
If this was happening in a running project of mine, the outage cost would have bin bigger than the value of the device. And I had to work so hard to even get it.
Such a despicable total service failure!
1. delayed communication
2. refused acceleration of the process (self delivery to the service center)
3. no communication with the engineer doing the assessment
4. hard to find recovery information (one line on the support page is missing: The system might use VMD drivers, if this is enabled in the BIOS you need to install these before the win11PE can access the SSD:(link to ASUS VMD drivers) . Maybe the ASUS created installation media would have the driver. But how do I know that this is the difference to the win11PE.
So in the moment it is like this:
When you send a device to ASUS repair, you are a victim exposed to extortion.
You can talk to people not having any clue. You can pay. And you receive a non-functional return.
Unacceptable for a professional user.
Conclusion: ASUS is for gamers only. Stay away if you have important stuff to do with your device!
