Early adopter being shafted by Vizio. Advice?

Posted by anstosa on November 25, 2012 12:16 pm 5

Here is the tl;dr of a long and sorrowful customer service tale.


I took a risk on Vizio’s gorgeous new laptops and bought one the day they were available. Unfortunately there were a few problems:

  1. The trackpad was slow, unresponsive, and inaccurate. I was promised immediately by CS that this would be improved soon with a software update.
  2. It shipped with a hardware RAID with an HDD and smaller SSD similar to Apple’s Fusion Drive (using Intel tech). However at a hardware level it was a RAID 0 and couldn’t be disabled because their BIOS has next to no features. Because of this, when I upgraded to Windows 8, it completely broke when I hit 35GB of storage. When the recovery failed, I tried to install Linux as a last resort but it only made things worse “Invalid arch independent ELF magic” (I knew it was Elves that made computers work...)

I was shipped a new recovery drive and got sort up back up and running with the promise that the new BIOS would be released for manual install before the Windows 8 launch

Fast forward 1 month

(I was stupid enough to let the return date pass me by riding on the promises of improved trackpad and BIOS). Vizio announces that the three existing 15” notebooks have been discontinued and that they have been replaced with a single model sporting a functional Synaptics trackpad instead of the shitty Sentelic one (effectively admitting that it was terrible and guaranteeing even slower, if any, cooperation between them and Sentelic for future updates.)


Fast forward another month

I have been furiously trying to get a refund or a new trackpad or anything out of Vizio. The trackpad is so bad that I haven’t used the laptop in almost two months. Vizio won’t budge and I don’t know what to do. I have a $1,300 gimp. Like owning a brand new car with steering so bad it’s dangerous to drive, but since it technically still steers, I can’t get a replacement. What can I do!?