Hacker News Reader

> NewEgg has to hire guys who sit there for hours installing Windows from the non-existent install disks (...)

Your argument hinges on the assumption the retailer is somehow `entitled' to being profitable, and consumers' rights come second.

Turns out consumer protection is not optional for a retailer. Whether they can stay afloat or not in the face of returns is up to them.

And I believe they well can stay in the black, given that:

* `installation' of Windows from a harddrive image is quick, low-tech and mostly hands-off process,

* as a major retailer they enjoy strong negotiating position with Microsoft or OEM for obtaining said images,

* if they really can't be bothered with the harddrive images, shipping the device to OEM for the work is cheap anyway, given they certainly exchange significant volume of cargo with 'em.

EDIT:

It does not make sense for the whole company to reject valid claims and be on the receiving end of geeks' anger. If I were to guess, the whole matter at Newegg was probably caused by some mid-level manager desperatly wanting good metrics -- like `valid customer complaints per thousand units sold' -- for his or her department. Just a case of misalligned incentives.

Nobody's entitled to anything. Newegg will do whatever they need to balance consumer happiness with their profit margins, and, if they can swing it, that'll include what you want.

The law does indeed entitle people to certain expectations. Lawless societies only benefit the very smallest minority, a current example; Somalia.

This is sorta true, but it's not laws as such that accomplish it. It's actually the existence of any institutions that guide the behavior of people, whether they are just social traditions, or religions, or laws.

For example, I've found that in China, people don't tend to line up for the bus. When it's coming, people just crowd around, and so the pushiest person is the one who gets the best seat. We don't have this problem in the US, but it's not a law that solves it for us. It's because our culture has inculcated into us the idea that each person should wait his turn.

Conversely, the imposition of a law doesn't necessarily "fix" the problem behaviors. For any law to work, people must accept its legitimacy and be willing to abide by it. And there's a bit of a Catch-22 at work there, because when everyone is breaking the law, an individual will see that on an individual basis, his compliance puts him at a disadvantage.

There's actually been a good deal of research, especially by Bill Easterly [1], examining what institutions tend to make some cultures thrive, while others languish in poverty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Easterly

If this is the state of things, it needs to change.

When I return a computer, the disk needs to be re-imaged no matter what operating system it boots to. Otherwise, they have no way of knowing that I didn't get all sorts of malware before returning the system. You're selling the next customer a potentially dangerous system that could get them into all sorts of liability if they handle financial information. In what world is that acceptable?

> If the laptop is truly defective, and you can't install the original operating system as a consequence, NewEgg has no quick means of determining what you did with the system ... and the manufacturer won't care either.

Or they could do what the user did and boot to Windows via USB/Disk, which (correct me if I'm wrong) shouldn't take much more time than booting to HDD. They are a huge online electronics retailer; is it really too much to ask that they have basic debugging/testing tools on hand?

If the retailer sold a defective product, the burden is on the retailer to test & fix the issue. Unless newegg has no way to reasonably test the system (claiming this would be absurd IMO), it is their responsibility to test it and see that it works. If you ship a broken product then refuse to fix it and wag your finger at the user for using it, that is bad business and it's rude.

My question: Does installing Linux really make it impossible to test the hardware without it costing "more than the laptop is worth"? Is it not possible to boot to disk or USB and run some hardware tests?

Newegg's stance could be reasonable if they disclosed it sensibly: "At Newegg you get the best prices for hardware and 'no-frills' service. We get you these low prices by streamlining our business processes ... including testing of returns. If you wish to take advantage of our 'no-frills' service, please leave the OEM OS on your laptop: supporting user installed OS costs more so if you install your own OS, be prepared to support the hardware yourself." Or something like that. A case could be made that servicing the 80% could result in a desirable reduction in retail prices that is good for the consumer. But then I wonder what the 80% on Newegg really looks like- what portion of their users is really keeping Windows on their boxes?

This is the most inane thing I have ever heard.

If you buy a laptop, you're not returning it because there's something wrong with the software. You're returning it because there's something wrong with the hardware.

If you bought a phone with a defective battery, would you delete all of your contacts out of it and image the OS before you returned it?

If you're asking consumers to do something to preserve your margins, go fuck yourself.

> If you bought a phone with a defective battery, would you delete all of your contacts out of it and image the OS before you returned it?

Yes, but of course security/privacy concerns call different rules into play...

That's you though. A shocking number of people buy stuff, get bored after a couple of days, send it back claiming a non-existent fault, and fully expect to get a refund.

That's right. And this is why we have a class of businesses called "retailers" whose function it is to absorb and amortize that risk. If you don't want to sell to the hoi polloi (edit: typo), don't: sell wholesale instead (you just won't get the same markup).

Sell to hoi polloi.

> If you buy a laptop, you're not returning it because there's something wrong with the software.

Sometimes it's not easy to tell if you're having a software or hardware problems. Especially for your average customer.

If my mom gets a "No Operating System" message on boot she won't spend time trying to figure out if the disk died or something overwrote the boot sector.

Does your mom install linux on her laptop?

That is a horrible argument. The distributor should absolutely not assume hardware is in factory condition because it looks like it. They should (at a minimum) be re-imaging the hard disk before sending it to another customer if it has Windows on it or not.

> NewEgg has to hire guys who sit there for hours installing Windows from the non-existent install disks (they don't include those anymore ... you gotta download them) so that they can recoup their losses? It would cost them more than the laptop is worth.

Do you know what an answer file is? They PXE boot it and walk away. There's no more oversight involved. We're deploying hundreds of new tablets and laptops at my work and I've been tasked with imaging every single one of them. The extent of my involvement is me pressing F12 during the POST. It's not as much work as you may think.

While I understand the economics of your argument, are you suggesting that NewEgg would resale a returned machine without wiping it and re-setting it up?

That would be a horrid security practice and open them up to liability lawsuits. I'm assuming they are smarter than that, in which case, wiping it is wiping it.

I understand what you're saying but if I have configured a Windows system and loaded my own files onto a system that I have purchased, I will most certainly wipe the disk if possible before returning it for warranty service/replacement. Yes, that may make determining if it's a NFF situation more difficult but you certainly can't expect customers to return systems with personal intact. (Although many will if they have no easy way of wiping the disk after a failure.)

I think you're right. The problem is they need to update their policy to say you can't change the OS.

On the other hand, If someone has logged into the machine at all the software has been changed and they can't simply resell it; it would seem they'd have to reinstall the OS regardless.

Yes, but they haven't updated their policy and after the initial kerfluffle, the told the Consumerist that it was a mistake and that it was not their policy to refuse such returns.

They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

Also, as others have pointed out, all they need is a disk image. They don't need to reinstall the OS by hand.

I'm pretty sure most of this is misinformation. Having worked in retail before, there are defined and accepted processes about how returns are handled. For my employer (who was MUCH smaller than NewEgg), we had what was called a "Return To Vendor"(RTV) process (actually, there is an entire industry around this).

We/someone would simply fill out some paperwork describing the problem(s) and the vendor/manufacturer would credit either fully, or some percentage, of the cost - including little plastic items, machined items, chemicals, etc. (there are exceptions, not literally _everything_). The cost to my employer was administrative overhead. There is no reason NewEgg should have to hire people to test all returned equipment (that should be outsourced to refurbishment/remanufacturing firms).

So, NewEgg is not stuck here with no options, and a little good will can go a long way.

Question: Do these laptops that NewEgg sell have a hidden restore partition like most laptops do these days? I think these are normally accessible via some F-key setting on bios startup... so not very difficult unless you have deleted this as well...

Considering that most Windows machines ship with MBR-partitioned disks, which limit you to 4 primary partitions each, it is not difficult to imagine somebody nuking the whole partition table before setting up. I prefer GPT to logical partitions, so in my case the restore partition would be gone anyway.

Man, I hope those restore partitions get wiped before resale too, otherwise I don't see what's stopping me from hardwiring my malware right into those.

Ha, I didn't think of that, I was just thinking about the OP saying people should restore the OS before returning to NewEgg, but very good point!

It doesn't really matter whether you installed a different OS on it though, they're going to need to wipe and restore the machine anyway. I imagine most laptop buyers aren't going to want a laptop full of someone else's porn and malware.

I'd imagine you just have a standard HDD disk image and when you re-furb a machine you just clone that onto the disk and then change the product key.

Where's everyones sense of information hygiene?

Don't return a system that you've actually used and put data on without secure wiping it, and if you're a retailer don't pass on somone elses malware-ridden child pornography containing worm box to an unsuspecting customer.