So, a week before my school started a hinge of my MSi GX620 broke. I called the MSi hotline and asked what to do. They said my warrenty of the laptop itself is over but the hinges have 2,5 years warrent (which is still valid). So I sent it there to fix. I had to wait like a month or two before they finally said the parts can't be delivered and they can't fix my laptop.

They offered me a replacement or to give my money back (the amount I paid for it). They offered a GE620DX (this one), but it's alot cheaper then the one I paid, so I think it's 'unfair' since I can just ask my money back and ask the expensive version.

The thing is, I need my old laptop back because I have data on my harddisk that contains very important school stuff. I obviously did not consider to make a backup since I expected to get it back soon. They have a policy that states they can replace or overwrite data without asking but I can't seem to find they said they ship your laptop when they're incompetent to fix their shit. I've spoken to a person from the Customer Service two weeks ago and they said they would send it back.

What the hell is this...

I am aware of their Policy but since it was a problem with the hinge, and not with the harddisk I thought 'They will not replace or overwrite the HDD'. They didn't; they just sent away my laptop! It also contains my Firefox with passwords and all other kind of private information, how can they just do this?

MSi <3 I've never liked it and this confirms my reasons to hate it.

I'm getting the money back at the end of this week or next week.

Even that takes ages...

Never ever send laptops or computers with an harddisk in for repair, always remove them. Last time I had a lengthy discussion with the Asus repair center, asking me for the harddisk. I refused. Repair centers need to have their own testing equipment and not rely on customer garbage.

In the end they replaced the motherboard (again) of my laptop without making further problems.

I worked for years on repair centers myself to know whats going on there

Quote from cargame.nl :

Never ever send laptops or computers with an harddisk in for repair, always remove them. Last time I had a lengthy discussion with the Asus repair center, asking me for the harddisk. I refused. Repair centers need to have their own testing equipment and not rely on customer garbage.

In the end they replaced the motherboard (again) of my laptop without making further problems.

I worked for years on repair centers myself to know whats going on there

Can you really send them with the HDD out? That would be a great solution...

Quote from Bose321 :

Can you really send them with the HDD out? That would be a great solution...

if not, swap it with a blank drive, or even a dead drive...

Quote from bunder9999 :

if not, swap it with a blank drive, or even a dead drive...

Ha, will do that next time.

Going to email them, still no money back.

not only MSi, had similar probs with Dell and HP before. Even a local shop ("Expert") just swept the whole drive when the GPU needed replacement (desktop PC, not laptop here).

Best customer service I received recently was from Cowon, when the volume buttons on my player stopped working due to bad handling on my part, they repaired(!) it, left all the music on it and added a free casing to avoid further damage. And all took less than three weeks.

Quote from Bose321 :

Can you really send them with the HDD out? That would be a great solution...

Not normally - at work we have to send pretty much everything back or it gets returned without being looked at.

Remember they get LOADS of not-faulty returns - a misdiagnosed software issue etc which they need to try to spot.

Although you should NEVER send your laptop back with your data on it. For many issues, a standard step is a factory restore....

Although a full refund on a 2.5 year old laptop is a very VERY generous offer.

I have a msi cr5000. bigest pile of shite ive ever touched, 2 weeks and the keyboard stops working, take it to argos where i bought it... o im sorry sir the keyboard isnt covered... ok so whats the point of warranty...
Anyway 3 weeks after that webcam stops working... I take it to argos, guess what Webcam isnt covered.
8 months later hhd packs up i ring argos and say whats happened, and yep, you guessed it. Hdd isnt covered in the 1 year warranty... so what exactly did i pay for?