Review for user kb9skw from leavercm

  • I posted in Sept of 05 looking for a P4 mobo and CPU. Nicholas posted a Shuttle AB60R and Celeron D. I took the offer.

    leavercm was the Seller on March 25, 2006 ArsTechnica

    My first mistake was paying first. He only had 2 Heat. I have 75ish and over 200 on Beerology. What was I thinking?

    He shipped the goods in better-than-par packaging. I split the combo due to other things I was doing. The Celeron D was fine. The mobo was a different matter.

    I put a 2.4/533 Northwood on the mobo and loaded it up for my oldest son. When gaming, he would notice sporadic lock-ups and pauses. I talked to Nicholas about this and he suggested drivers or a different video card. I swapped drivers around, tried an Nvidia card instead of the Ati I had in it - nothing changed. I communicated this all to Nick. I even wiped the system and started over with the bare minimum drivers needed - nothing helped. After each step I sent a summary to Nick. Most of the time I didn\'t get an acknowledgement until a week or two later.

    Then things went really downhill. His communication became less frequent. Sometimes weeks would pass.

    I finally got him to agree to take the board back on December 8th. It took him A WHOLE MONTH and 3 e-mails for him to respond to confirm his ship-to address. I shipped immediately thereafter. He received the mobo back Fed Ex ground on January 10th. I followed up with an e-mail reminding him that I needed non-CC Paypal for a refund. On the 11th, he sent me CC-paypal which I promptly rejected. I immediatley e-mailed him an explanation as to why I could not accept it. 4 days later he acknowledged and said he had to \"borrow some money\" for someone in order to pay me back otherwise. I find that odd when he had been buying/selling in Agora through December. It is suspicious that he would go suddenly \"broke.\" 9 days later he responded to say that he had money to send me and he wanted to know if an MO be OK. I didn\'t want an MO because I needed to send some Paypal to someone else but I reluctantly accepted in order to get the money and be done with this whole mess. (January 24th)

    6 days later and no MO shows up (He\'s in Chicago and I am in Grand Rapids, MI - it\'s a 4 hour drive) and I get the Agora Mods after him. (It\'s now January 31st.) He responds almost immediately to say the MO was mailed on Saturday the 28th. I receive the MO on Feb 1.

    I WOULD NOT deal with him again because his (lack of) communication is not worth the extra effort I would have to put into it to make a deal happen.

    I justify a Negative based upon the following:
    1) Unacceptable communication - followup was slow, sporadic, or had to be extracted via Mod intervention.
    2) Lack of timely response - he claimed lack of a car as slowing up getting the MO. If I were being threatened with banning from the Forum, I would do whatever necessary to facilitate things - not wait until it was \"convenient.\"
    3) Attitude - He said I should be thankful he is giving me a refund because it took me 3 months to give up on the board. If his initial troubleshooting e-mails had been more timely, I would have been able to come to a conclusion much sooner.

    March 26, 2006