Hate to be the first ane only (so far) negative review here, but the facts do need to be exposed here.
I bought my Gamers Edge PCX Custom PC back in November of 2006. Right out of the box, there were some stability issues whereby I would get blue screens with white text telling me about some bad thing or another taking place and crashing the system. But heck, I figured being on the cutting edge this was commonplace. And I thought that driver updates would eventually solve those problems.
I gradually started trusting the system enough to actually use it, at least I figured with all the money I spent on this thing, I really SHOULD start using it. Minor crashes still happened here or there, but I learned to do backups religiously and didn't sweat it too much. Not very happy about it, but the system was pretty fast, and I guess I just tunnel visioned the bad stuff out of sight.
Well then things started getting more serious. Luckily I opted for the three year warranty, otherwise I would have been in worse trouble than I am right now. Not long after the year warranty expired where I had onsite service, the liquid cooling pump quit. That meant shipping the system back to VM for repair. Since I had disposed of the box, I was informed that I needed to purchase another one in order to be safe about the dangers of shipping damage. So OK, I did it. The pump got replaced, and things seemed to be kind of back to normal.
Until the second pump failed. Back to the shop again, but fortunately I had been smart enough to retain the box this time. I asked them to yank out that liquid cooling stuff and put air cooling in it. I wasn't having much luck with that crap.
The details are kind of sketchy at this point, because the number of failures and flaky crashes multiplied rapidly. Along the line I had to replace one of the RAM modules. Then I had drive C problems (I have two 150gb Velociraptors in RAID 0 as drive C). Got a few instances of intermittent RAID ACCESS failures that seemed to go away when I would shut down the system and reseat the SATA cables.
More problems ensued, so I again had to ship the computer back to VM. This is the third time... I decided to try to shed the system of the flaky problems by paying for an upgraded motherboard, new RAM, and a faster/better processor. I thought VM would give me a break on the pricing, but no, they actually tried to royally REAM my on the pricing. It wasn't until I sent them evidence of the prices they were using being WAY OVER retail that they cut the price somewhat. I was a bit miffed about this, because I was spending this money to try to fix problems from the original hardware I had purchased from them.
I mentioned several times along the way about those nagging RAID ACCESS failures I was getting. When they happened, simply rebooting the system would get a RAID failure in the bootup process during the RAID startup sceen, where it is supposed to show "Healthy" for status.
Anyway, after the third return, the system still wasn't behaving very well, and gradually deteriorated to where it would just lock up solid in maybe a half hour, or maybe after 4 hours. No warning, just drop dead with the screen frozen. About that time I found the MEMTEST diagnostic tool and decided to run it to try to ruly out the issues. VM was getting insistent that it was a Windows issue and wanted to wipe my hard drive clean and reinstall Windows. I was adamant about this not taking place, because it would take me weeks, and perhaps months to reload all the applications and data I use that computer for.
So I really wanted to prove to myself that this was a hardware issue and NOT Windows at fault.
MEMTEST would not run longer than about 8 minutes with everything disconnected. I pulled out the higher memory card and it would run sometimes for 3 hours. Sometimes not. I tried the other card by itself (I had two 2gb cards installed) and it would fail almost immediately. Seems like a bad RAM module to me. I tried moving the nearly "good" RAM module around, and it would fail when I tried it in the other motherboard slots. Wow... bad motherboard as well? Well guess what? ANOTHER trip back to VM.
Around this time I wrote to quite a few people at VM, obvously frustrated and angry at all this down time. I have wasted MONTHS with this computer and lost a lot of productive time. I have videos stored away of events for my message board sites that I wanted to process to help promote traffic that I could not use because sure as heck the system would DIE right in the middle of processing and waste even more of my time. I have hardware and software that I could not install that has now passed way beyond the offered return periods that I have not been able to even use.
I requested a completely new system to replace this OBVIOUS lemon computer system. Ellen denied this request pretty bluntly and said they would fix my system instead. Well, heck, if VM could do that, why haven't they already? But OK, I had no other choice but to just send the system back and hope for the best. But I'll level with you, by this point I was seriously jaded and lacking in any faith in this box. I am actually contemplating, depending on how things pan out, simply taking this thing down to my shooting range and using it for a target. THEN send it back to VM.
Anyway, back to the chain of events...
This time they replaced the motherboard with a newer upgraded version (and I didn't even have to offer to pay for it this time) as well as both new RAM modules. They ran diagnostics and it appeared to be passing with flying colors. I again mentioned that RAID ACCESS failure thing, in the hopes that perhaps considering the HISTORY of this system, they would put in new drives, copy the data from the original to the new drives, and do the prudent thing of trying to eliminate a possible flaky hard drive problem. But, nope, that didn't happen.
So I got my system back around 10 days ago. When I opened the box, the hard drive cage was sitting an an odd angle. What caught my attention first was that the cable from the motherboard to the card reader was disconnected at both ends. When I took off the panels, that's when I saw that the hard drive cage had been torn from the bracket at the bottom of the case. Well, I guess I bucked the odds for too long. FedEx and UPS moved this system back and forth nine (9) times, so my luck just ran out. Anyway, I just received the replacement drive cage today, but did I get the replacement bracket that was also bent all to heck? Nope. So really, this does me one heck of a lot of good.
Also a few days ago, the RAID ACCESS Failure message popped up again. Well, that's just lovely. And even worse, it is happening more frequently now and has made the system basically useless. I was in a REAL panic because I took a chance and started doing my taxes on this system. Yeah, I should have know better, but after running fine for several days, I thought well gee, maybe they DID finally fix this turkey. Luckily I was able to recover the TurboTax file....
So that is where we are now. My service tickets are pretty much being ignored. I did get one reply to try running a hard drive diagnostic, which I did, but the problem is not with the hard drive surface areas. One of those raided drives is just dropping off line intermittently. This is pretty obvious based on the evidence. In the meantime I sent another useless attempt to contact the president of Velocity Micro. Not that he has bothered to reply in the past. So I also contacted the Better Business Bureau in Richmond and filed a complaint. And I have been talking to my attorney to have him research what sort of lemon laws and fitness of use for purchased merchandise will apply in this case.
Right now, what I want is a full refund for this piece of crap. I have had computers at home since around 1977 and all of those computers COMBINED never gave me a tenth of the headaches that this single Velocity Micro system is now giving me.
Unusualy you say? Well, maybe so. But do you really want to take the chance of being in my shoes by buying your own Velocity Micro system? Why can't they fix this thing? Why won't they do the right thing to resolve an issue with an obvious lemon? What would YOU do in my shoes right now?
And what are the chances that this won't be deleted in pretty short order?
So I'm going to be painting a bright red target on the butts of those ostriches.....
