Liquidated damages

What do you do when you're denied warranty service because the vendor claims your system was damaged by a mythical spill of some liquid? I often hear from people who know they didn't spill the milky substance they are being told has invalidated their warranty, but can't prove it. One reader in such a situation however recently found a way to get his warranty honored, and in the process made a point from the d

What do you do when you're denied warranty service because the vendor claims your system was damaged by a mythical spill of some liquid? I often hear from people who know they didn't spill the milky substance they are being told has invalidated their warranty, but can't prove it. One reader in such a situation however recently found a way to get his warranty honored, and in the process made a point from the discussions we've had about the questionable value of extended warranties.

Two-and-a-half years ago the reader bought a Toshiba Satellite M45-S355 laptop and a three-year Technology Assurance Plan (TAP) extended warranty at his local CompUSA store. "Last July the system started to have a problem where it wouldn't stay powered up, so I took into the CompUSA to get it fixed under the extended warranty," the reader writes. "Four weeks later it came back, but it still had the same problem. After being on for an hour or so, it would die and it would only power on again after I took the battery out and reinserted it. This time it time it took six weeks before it was declared fixed and returned to me."

On October 22nd the reader received his laptop and discovered immediately that the system still died after a few hours, so the very next day it went back to CompUSA for a third time. He didn't hear anything about it again until shortly before Christmas (he found out later that his laptap had sat at the CompUSA store for weeks before being sent to the Nexicore depot, where all three repairs were done.) And it wasn't good news. "CompUSA called to tell me that they had found evidence of 'customer liquid spill damage' on the motherboard," the reader wrote. "As liquid damage is not covered under TAP's terms and conditions, the extended warranty repair was being declined."

The reader was quite certain that if liquid had been spilled on his laptop, it wasn't the customer who spilled it. "I'm very vigorous about not allowing liquids around my computers, but I can't prove that I never spilled anything on the laptop. I didn't, but I'm sure that there are lots of people who lie about that when they really did spill coffee or soda on it. So how do I prove it, and who do I prove it to? CompUSA is going out of business, so they don't care. Toshiba or Assurant Solutions, the company that's responsible for the TAP program now, are going to believe Nexicore, not me."

To make things seemingly more daunting, when the laptop was finally returned in January, still with the same power problem, Nexicore attached photos purporting to show the damaged motherboard. The vague outlines of what could possibly be a puddle of something can be seen. "I showed it to an expert and he says it look mores like flux than a liquid, which would be consistent with the work Nexicore did on the motherboard the second time they had it. But even opening the laptop again might not prove it one way or the other."