It is my sincerest hope that none of you reading this have ever had the misfortune of doing business with Cyberpower Inc. While some have had tremendous luck with this company (bastards), most - including myself - have developed ulcers and lockjaw from their interactions with Cyberpower. Have a seat, break out the violin, and listen to my sad, sad story.
In November of 2007, our HP Pavilion a418x started to take a turn for the worse. The 2.7 GHz single-core Intel Celeron processor, along with the NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 PCI video card and 700-something megs of PC2700 RAM just weren't performing to our liking anymore. More specifically, they weren't performing to my liking. Games like Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 looked more like a family vacation slide show (albeit with a tiny bit more guns and blood) rather than the truly epic PC games that they are. I wanted a system that kicked ass. Our system most definitely did not kick ass. At the time, I didn't know nearly as much about computers as I do now, so rebuilding the system to kick ass was not an option (although since then, with the help of my beloved Newegg, I did build it to kick quite a bit more ass than it was previously capable of kicking). My solution: Buy a completely new system that did kick ass.
There was a problem with my solution, though. Just four months prior, my wife and I found out that we were pregnant with our first child. Someone somewhere at some point in my life told me that having kids costs money. Brand-new kick ass computers also cost money. Crap. Time to refine my solution a bit.
I went on the internet and searched for cheap computers that didn't take eighteen years to boot up (which then went on to sound like an angry badger being shut in an oven whilst performing only slightly better than an abacus). In my searches, I found Cyberpowerpc.com. The website appeared to sell some pretty slick machines, and only at a fraction of the price of bigger manufacturers like Dell or HP. There was much rejoicing.
After getting my wife's permission to use the credit card (shut up), I excitedly ordered our brand-new, kick ass system. This new computer was light years ahead of our old computer (I hate that term... but it's so true). I was absolutely ecstatic about it, and couldn't wait to play all of my favorite games on a computer that didn't suck.
It was only after ordering the computer that I found the negative reviews. Ah, crap. I decided to remain optimistic and stick with my order, as I was desperate to have this new system. Silly, silly me. My order was delayed more than four times, and finding out any information on why it was delayed or when I would have it was next to impossible. Cyberpower's customer service representatives, along with leprechauns, unicorns, and other mythical creatures, are very difficult to find. I became very nervous that this company had just screwed me out of $700 worth of kick ass computer.
Finally, on Christmas Eve (over a month after I place my order), I received the new computer. For the first two weeks, it worked flawlessly. Games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Painkiller, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Quake 4, and Oblivion performed wonderfully on high settings. After about two weeks, however, the computer started to freeze up completely. I figured it was a fluke, and rebooted, but then it started happening more and more frequently. Finally, the computer wouldn't run more than five minutes without locking up. Damn.
I tried to contact tech support for Cyberpower. I grew a beard and raised a litter of grizzly bears while on hold. When I finally got a hold of someone, he was actually very nice and helpful. He told me that one of the RAM sticks must be bad, so I should send it back and get a new one. That was pretty painless enough - I sent back the faulty stick, got a new one, and the computer did great... for another two weeks. Then the same ugly problem was happening again. I tried simply switching DIMM slots on the motherboard, which postponed my problem for a while, but eventually it became as persistent as before. After another century on hold for tech support, we decided it was the motherboard that was causing problems, and we needed to replace it.
Again, the exchange process went fairly smoothly. I got the new motherboard installed, and the computer again worked great for a while. Guess what happened then... c'mon, guess... yeah! Once again, it was teh sux0rz! And once again, I was able to thumb through the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation while on hold for tech support. And once again, the motherboard was found to be the culprit. When I replaced this one, the damn thing still didn't work right. It was at this point that I said, "Screw you" to tech support and solved the problem on my own using Google and a prayer. Now, over a year after receiving my computer, it has worked without error longer than ever. I'm really happy with the way it performs when it's not FUBAR, but it has been a super huge pain in the ass up until this point (I counted, and I've written "ass" in this post nine - make that ten - times. Sorry...).
Bottom of the line is: Please, please, pretty please, do yourself a favor and stay far, far away from Cyberpowerpc. Horrible customer service combined with a crappy product make this company a friggin' nightmare to do business with, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Most anyone, I should say... you know who you are.
In case anyone's interested, this is the system I now have (I added quite a few things - like the graphics card, extra RAM, hard drive, and power suppply - after I got it from Cyberpower):
Motherboard: GigaByte GA-M57SLI-S4 nForce 570-SLI Chipset
CPU: AMD Athlon™64 X2 5200+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology
GPU: XFX PVT88SFDD4 GeForce 8800GS XXX 384MB Superclocked Alpha Dog Edition
HDD: 2 X 250GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8MB Cache 7200RPM
RAM: 4GB PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory
PSU: OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI
Pretty nice, for what I need at least.
Ass. Ha! That's eleven.
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