Tech support hardware swap policy

This is a page concerning a policy or procedure in development.
Once fleshed out, we'll consider it for adoption as official policy at Free Geek.

Policy

Body that set the policy(s) on [lists.freegeek_meeting_Minutes Date Adopted].

From time to time Tech Support will encounter 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 troubleshoot and repair, usually they can be fixed or further 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)
• Video does not work at all (after trying a different card)
• System does not POST.

User modified boxes: If a user has made hardware modifications to a system, it's hard for us to tell if the issues they are having is our fault or theirs. We also need to avoid situations 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 exchange unless its clearly unrelated to what the user has modified.

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

• Inform the user
• Find a similarly spec'd system to swap
• Install the users old drive into the new system (unless old drive is bad or the user doesn't care)
• Install and setup any additional hardware that was in the old system (wireless cards, modems, etc) and test
• Send old machine to Build to QC or recycling

Notes

Include some or all of:

• the current process for complying with this policy
• Related policies
• Interpretation/Implementation/Commentary
• Examples/Background/History
• Exceptions/Ramifications
• Etc...