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In the Forums... |
Posted: March 22, 2006
Written by: Charles Perkinson Trouble! Since the last installment of this series, I ordered and received all the necessary parts for building my Shuttle computer. The only changes I made from my last reported configuration were the optical drive and memory. I changed the optical drive from an NEC DVD burner to one sold by Shuttle, simply because its bezel was designed to appear flush with the XPC model I was assembling. For the memory I opted to purchase a single 1GB stick of Corsair XMS rather than the dual channel kit for the simple reason that I would then have the ability to add another stick of RAM in the future rather than being restricted to the 1GB that I originally started with. The build went smoothly and I documented the entire process, however after initially booting the computer and installing windows I immediately faced a serious issue. Once the necessary drivers had been installed I began to alter Windows to suit my needs and taste. The first step in this is adjusting the resolution of the monitor to 1280 x 1024, however to my dismay, upon doing this I faced the horrors of a blank, unresponsive screen. Once the screen returned, it was merely composed of a multitude of horizontal lines. This was both shocking and disappointing, but my initial thought was that the source of such an issue was a bad driver (most likely the video driver). After entering Safe Mode and removing the alleged faulty driver, I returned to Windows and downloaded the latest driver updates, assuming this would cure my computer woes. I was horribly wrong. The same issue arose upon adjusting the resolution. I proceeded to download Windows updates, install the newest .NET Framework files, and everything else I could think of, but nothing resolved the issue. After contacting other technicians and testing my friend's PCI-Express video card in my system, we confirmed the problem was a faulty on-board video chip. Time for Tech-Support... Today I contacted Shuttle's technical support division by phone to determine the proper course of action in such a situation. I was surprised when I was immediately greeted with a customer service representative -- no annoying automated menus, no infinite loop of numerical selections, but simply a human being with whom I could converse and vent my frustration. I relayed my issue and asked what the options were. He seemed sympathetic and gave me the information I needed to process an RMA, however he made it clear that I was required to pay for the shipment of the product to the repair center. This was a little disappointing, since it seemed like I was paying for their problem, but fortunately the shipping cost only amounted to $18. That is the most up-to-date news I can provide on the Shuttle project. Don’t be turned off by the first attempt ending in failure, I typically have bad luck with custom computer builds initially. I only hold a grudge if I get two bad parts from a single company -- the first I just consider to be a random manufacturing flaw. This gives us the opportunity to evaluate the customer service of Shuttle. I will update you when the XPC barebones kit is reshipped to me, and I reconstruct the computer. Stay tuned for updates!
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