There are still good companies out there...

I sometimes use this blog as a place to vent frustrations about poor customer service. Overall, I think many companies have lost touch with their customers. As a result of really not caring, they provide dismal service. I will rattle off a few with which I've had poor dealings recently: iBahn (a.k.a. STSN - hotel internet company) and Presentation Services (a.k.a. Conference Solutions - AV projector rental) come to mind.

I'm going to try to highlight companies that have fulfilled their duty as corporate citizens. First up is ASUS motherboards. A little over a year ago I purchased an ASUS A8N SLI board for my new home-built computer. A few weeks ago there was a horrible noise coming from the inside of the case. Fearing that my CPU fan or case fan was dying (which can lead to sudden and irreversible death to a computer), I shut everything down. It was only after I popped open the case and took a listen during a reboot that I realized it was my chipset fan. This tiny fan, which sits on top of the "Northbridge" chipset, was in its death throes.

Cleaning the fan with compressed aid yielded a temporary fix, but when I rebooted the fan would refuse to spin up on its own.

A quick Google search yielded a smattering of folks with the same problem. ASUS was providing a free replacement fan for the asking. I phoned ASUS at 510-739-3777 extension 3 (not a toll-free call, but that's OK since I have Vonage and there is no such thing as a long distance call any more) and provided my mother board's serial number. Less than a week later a replacement fan showed up on my doorstep. Installation was a snap, and I'm now back to normal with no worries of an overheated chipset. Kudos to ASUS for standing by their product even though it wasn't under warranty.