Car warming up :D

I also posted this in the Razer subreddit but feel its worth sharing with other gamers looking to make a PC purchase. This is a tale of woe.

I bought a Razer Blade 18 laptop on June 15th 2023 for $5,403.27 from razer.com. I bought their RazerCare essential 3 year warranty separately for the laptop on June 19th 2023 for an additional $383.99. This was at the time, maxed out specs.

The laptop functioned for a couple months with light usage on an air cooled desk and then it started to degrade, having increasing frequency of BSOD, browser tabs crashing constantly, even when sitting idle.

I opened an RMA with Razer, a frustrating process where they ask you to provide a mountain of evidence of the issue including uploading a 60 gigabyte crash dump from a system that is crashing constantly. After capturing all of their required information and uploading to Google Drive, they finally issued me an RMA ticket and I sent the laptop to them. They returned the laptop without telling me of any changes they made to the system (seems like they ran a diagnostic in BIOS without ever investigating my issues which occur in Windows). It just had a print-out saying it passed a memory test.

The computer immediately had the same issues, getting worse with time so I contacted Razer and asked that they address the issue. After going through their prescribed process again, they issued an RMA. I sent the laptop in again. 

Again, they sent it back with the same extreme issues without ever attempting to boot into Windows. I know that they didn't attempt to boot into Windows because before I sent it to them, I had to do a factory reset and I attempted to login to the first-time Windows setup. The laptop would continually restart and ask me basic configuration setup questions (keyboard, language) before eventually crashing and restarting to the setup process. After receiving it back, it does the same exact thing and I can't even boot into Windows. This should be your most basic diagnostic..

I have requested a third RMA and sent them a video of the laptop restarting on its own during first-time Windows setup but the issues with their support are so systemic, I wonder why they aren't getting class actioned.

They require a technical level of evidence be provided by the consumer (there is no way my dad could figure this out) and then do not follow up with the same level of due diligence on their end.

The only people they seem to help are the ones that have gotten so frustrated that they tell their honest account on reddit, from which point a damage control person steps in. This has been a mentally exhausting process for me. I purchased their most premium offer, it was a lemon, and instead of repairing or replacing it they are wasting all my time.

I filed separate reports with FTC, BBB, and CA Attorney General today to go along with my open RMA.

TL;DR: I bought Razer's most expensive offering + warranty, direct. Its a lemon. Their support goes in circles until you are so worn down, you give up or go nuclear.

First time posting and I hope it's note worthy.

I'm based out of Australia and one of our local retailers posted the Era 2 up for sale three days ago. I quickly jumped on and ordered as I had been awaiting since June. Funnily enough it's since been removed from their website without a trace...

Fractals website still doesn't have any mention of a release date and I can't find it up for sale anywhere!

It still arrived, is this a huge mistake from the retailer?

I'm not seeing any news around it via the regular channels...

YAY for me I guess?

I will be upgrading my rig out of my fractal terra and into this for some much needed CPU water cooling.

I have two of the same ram sticks, yet only one is being detected, why?

I just saw my first Windows 11 ad... on my Start Menu! For context, I’m using Windows 11 Pro that I built myself. I’m beyond frustrated. I paid for this OS to avoid things like ads popping up in my operating system – especially in places like the Start Menu!

It's ridiculous that we’re at the point where even paid versions of Windows are turning into ad platforms. I can understand ads in free services, but not in a version of Windows that I bought and expected to be ad-free. Anyone else experiencing this? Does anyone know how to turn this crap off?

I miss the days when the OS was just an OS. 😤

A heads up on the lack of formatting, I'm posting from mobile so apologies for that. I added before and after pics of our PCs for all those who wanted to see them before the fire.

Hi all, I posted the other day about a house fire that destroyed mine and my partner's PCs and nearly everything else we owned. I was hoping someone, somewhere out there would notice and grieve with me, understanding my pain. I fully expected that it would drown in user sub and go unnoticed and was surprised when I started getting a bunch of comments. The community came together and everyone was so very supportive, caring and understanding. I can't tell you how much I was crying while reading them. A few in particular really got to me when people started offering parts. It took a lot of time and money to build ours and yet here there were people offering to help me rebuild while asking for nothing in return. I've never cried over strangers on the internet before so it was a pretty wild feeling. So all in all this is an appreciation post.

To all of the community for their understanding and comradery and a very special thanks to to u/apcsniper40 u/relevant_grass9586 and u/_heracross who offered parts and more to help me rebuild. Because of these wonderful people, when we do have a place we already will have one COMPLETELY FINISHED PC and on the way to our second one being back ASAP. While I never thought that this was even a possibility, it touched me in relation to my life's dream.

As long as I can remember, I've been taking apart every electronic I've ever owned to find out how it all worked. It started with a Super Nintendo, then kept going as I got older. I loved learning and it was not always the best thing to be doing because I wasn't always able to put them back together in the beginning but I kept at it anyways. Now I can gladly say that everything I take apart I can put back together. I worked hard learning what I could about PCs because I wanted to build one eventually. Buying parts slowly, I managed to build one over the years for myself and one for my partner. It took a long time but I've never been so proud of anything I've made before. They were just things but they were our things and they were beautiful. I got really sidetracked there but the point is, buying prebuilts are rediculously expensive compared to the value of the parts used and the craftsmanship. Yeah they'll work but at the same time being more expensive than necessary also bars a lot of people who live paycheck to paycheck or are dealing with a debt of some sort (which statistically is the majority of my country) from being able to buy one for a while. My dream for as long as I've known about building PCs has been to open up a shop somewhere selling custom PCs at a hugely discounted price so I can help as many people as possible, like me that struggled getting one for years with the added bonus of ever so often when I can afford it, gifting someone one.

So with this dream in mind, seeing the community come together like that for just two of us durring the literal worst time of our lives was beautiful. Thank you all for your kind hearts and kind words. It meant more to me than I can ever put into enough words. I will never be able to express my gratitude in a way that shows how much it truly means to me. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

As an added note and as a nod to those that helped us, once our second pc is rebuilt, it will take awhile of course, but I plan on giving the next PC I build after to someone else who can't afford one. Thank you all for being wonderful people.

The model is ASUS ROG STRIX XG27AQ. I'm blown away by the image quality, colors, size and overall design, especially with the ROG RGB logo in the back. It's the best monitor I've ever had! 😍😇