shipping motherboard back to china

[Van]

Recently my pc died and I thought it was the motherboard but it wasn't and after replacing what it actually was I found that I needed to ship the replacement board back as it was defective so far as I can tell.

Today I went to the post office to send the board back and was given the following prices to ship back a 1.5lb piece of electronics back to ShenZhen China.

With tracking 6 - 10 days $78

Standard priority 6 - 10 days $45

Mind you the medium flat rate priority box is $10.43 and I had done a price estimate the night before on usps.com on a 3lb item that came to $21. So if I send it back with the tracking number I will be spending $78 to get back $63 of the original $88 I spent to get the damned thing.

Now this is why I think the board is defective.

When I hooked up the new power supply the cpu fan and case fan and power supply and drives came on but there was no boot up, basically all the motors came on but that was it. The only thing that I can think of that may have been at issue was the case power button connection at the board could have been turned around backwards but with an old board from before this was not an issue.

 

[diogen]

Bad CPU/Video/RAM can all trigger the same symptoms...

Diogen.

 

[Van]

All those were transferred back to the original board and its up and running as I type.

 

[mike123abc]

Ouch the postage probably more than the board costs in China.

 

[charper1]

Did I miss it? Why are you having to ship it back to China as opposed to a retailer here?

 

[Van]

ebay

 

[charper1]

ahh; nuff said

 

[avg1joe]

That stinks.

I wonder how that works on their end. Is it cheaper for them to send it in our direction?

 

[Van]

Looks that way but without knowing how much the board was for them to purchase individual or lot or bulk minus the profit then there's no way of knowing.

 

[harshness]

I'd be confirming any jumper settings and starting with a minimum number of connections (usually RAM, speaker, power supply and power switch).

 

[Van]

Just checked my email and the seller has offered to refund $63 and if I'm not happy with that the full price. She also said that she makes $12 - $15 on the boards that she sells. I opted to go with the $63 refund offer.

 

[navychop]

Best settlement.

 

[vaylon]

On many older motherboards (2-4 years old), its best to install the video card by itself when you start up the system for the first time and keep your memory at a minimum too.
If you can get to the bios screen, then your in good shape. If not, try removing the battery for a few minutes and then try to restart and get to the bios.

What board was it?

 

[Van]

There was no getting to the bios screen, like I said all that happened was the fans powered up and the drives powered up but the board would not trigger the monitor nor would it go into any kind of boot up or drive activity other than the drives spinning. The monitor remained in dormancy mode. It was HP IPIBL-LA Berkeley-GL8E Motherboard ASUS Compaq MOBO for my hp pavilion a6152n mid tower. When I got the box from USPS it had suffered damage to the side causing it to be accordioned like something heavy was dropped on it. The seller had packed it really well wrapping it in bubble wrap and surrounded with several layers of styrofoam and the board itself was in the original unopened anti static bag. One of the caps looked to be at an odd angle an felt a bit loose but the solder was intact and there was no obvious cracking of the board or solder.

 

[vaylon]

If you have already shipped it back, then ignore this.
But a lot of those boards came with older bio's that didn't support the 45nm chips without a bio's flash.
Unless you have an older chip, then it's kind of a moot point.

 

[Van]

I haven't shipped it back due to the high cost.

I don't think thats the issue though, like I said all that happened was the drives and fans wound up and nothing else, not even any drive activity other than the power up similar to turn the ignition of a car to on to give the system power but not starting the engine.