had two issues right out of the gate when it arrived from xoticpc. a gpu failure causing total graphical corruption and an issue with registering the extension. purchase was september 10/11 2011. slow shipping meant that by time of receipt on the unit i was outside simply returning or exchanging with xotic over the flaw(x>30days) without a fee, and i had went with asus warranty+extension over the in house warranty xotic offered on the theory that it would be better to cut out the middleman. this is an NA warranty and i'm in ohio usa.

to the graphical issue after almost a year finally got xotic and a service guy at asus talking in a three way conversation on it at the same time, and got it rma'd for a fix.

at the same time a trevor costanza (the asus service fellow for this) indicated that the base warranty for my units serial was registered for a time 5 months prior to my purchase order(!), that the warranty extensions were done electronically by the authorized reseller and no number or card were provided anymore, and that given the order invoice forwarded directly from xotic it would be corrected while it was in for rma. took a while in for the rma but trevor was very helpful and communicative. took a full mobo replacement apparently to stop the irregular but frequent failing of the gpu, and according to his messages back at me the rma wouldn't impact my now corrected warranty start and duration to 3 years na through asus.

fast forward a bit to may this year. which should be the final year of the warranty period (11/2011-11/2014 = 3).
i prep for a trip, pull my external keyboard and am prepping for a trip and find my "D" key isn't responding consistently. over the course of the next couple days this progresses to not responding at all.

so i start trying to get ahold of someone in support, to see what details i'm gonna need, and thinking to myself that it'd be really great if i can find a way to simply cross ship the keyboard module and not risk shipping related failure on the machine as a whole, but if i must send the whole thing in maybe i could get them to once over the rest, maybe replace the thermal pads etc since its gonna take a month out of my hands and its getting toward the end of service coverage.

instead i proceed from grand responses like " please check drivers are installed"(for raw keyboard standard keys, really?? doesn't work in multiple os environments and this is the form response???) up through now being told the warranty ended.

my last message to support was a copy of the entire back and forth with trevor during the previous rma on the unit up to and including where he confirms the period being corrected to 3 years, and asking if this lily yang person could please direct me to someone who could explain or rectify the disparity between what service told me and what service is telling me now. that was a month ago.

so here i am. i have a log of the communications prior in that gmail account so its all nice and route+timestamped in a third partys storage. i have eyeballed simply saying screw it, this is the last time i trust em, and trying to simply buy a replacement keyboard module, but apparently they run near 100$ for this unit. quick popup of the keyboard retention to check and the two ribbon cables don't appear damaged and do appear seated securely.

so here i am. dunno if mason or cl-albert, or anyone else might be able to help figure this out, but i figured i'd give it a try because it was a suggested last step over on the notebookreview forums.

so what is the deal here?

can anyone help me out here because time is ticking away, and that extension was a 200$ security blanket against this sort of thing and it is starting to feel like i'm getting jerked around until it'd actually be out of warranty.

i know you have some excellent people in the service department, i know you have some who aren't so excellent, people are people and all that. could you help me find one of the good ones and get this fixed pretty please?

if you need the prior rma case number or anything else please ask, heck if you have a direct email i'll forward that entire 2011 conversation with [***email edited by cl-Albert***] to boot.