Tech support hardware swap policy

Hardware swapping

From time to time tech support will enocunter hardware that either in part or in whole needs to be changed. Sometimes systems have things fail that would simply take too much time for us to trouble shoot and repair, usually they can be fixed or futhre diagnosed elsewhere at a later time.

Conditions for swapping an entire system (box):

• System does not turn on at all
• Motherboard is bad (blown caps, or otherwise non-memory/video related issues)

User modified boxes: If a user has made hardware modifications to a system, its hard for us to tell if the issues they are having is our fault or not. We also need to avoid cases where a user may try to pass off their own bad hardware (memory, video card, etc) as ours in order to get an exchange. If a user has not taken the build class then we may not want to make an exchanges unless its clearly unreleated to what the user has modified.

Once we determin that we are going to swap a system we need to:

• inform the user
• find a similarly spec'd system to swap for
• install the users old drive into the new system (unless old drive is bad/user doesnt care)
• install and setup any additional hardware that was in the old system (wireless cards, modems, etc) and test