It's been a while since Meltz has been able to use his laptop the way he intended. He says almost immediately after he took it out of the box, something was wrong.
"It was like the LCD screen was dying. It would get lines across it. All the colors would darken, look like shadows and it would flicker," said Meltz.
Meltz sent it back to the manufacturer Asus. A few weeks later he got it back with a note saying they couldn't find anything wrong with it.
"It still had the exact same problem as soon as I opened it up," said Meltz.
So Meltz sent it back a second time. This time Asus replaced a part, but a few months later, the problem returned.
"It started getting progressively worse and worse. So I ended up having to send it back to them again for a third time," said Meltz.
A couple of weeks later, Asus told him his computer was ready for pick up, then told him they needed to do more testing. Another month and a half came and went. Finally, Asus sent a laptop back to Meltz, but it wasn't his.
"It had blemishes, it had scratches all over the casing. I could tell it was not my laptop," said Meltz.
He called the company to find out why he had been sent a refurbished unit. No one returned his call. So he called 7 On Your Side. We called Asus and the company promptly called him.
"He also offered to switch the casing on it so it looked brand new and to switch out my data, my hard drive from my original lap top into this new one," said Meltz.
Asus declined an on-camera interview, but in an email wrote: "In the end, we did end up sending Mr. Joshua Melta a replacement unit… some problems are inevitable...but our reputation for quality is excellent."
"Thanks for getting them to give me a call and getting them to finally assign someone to my case that could actually help me out," said Meltz.
Asus has received high marks for quality and reliability in recent surveys by both PC World and PC Magazine.
