Asus's utterly dysfunctional repair/warranty process

I would strongly warn anyone considering buying an Asus laptop to take into account how dysfunctional their repair process is. I would have been far better off approaching a third party repair center and paying thousands of rands for replacement parts. It hurts to think about how much income, productivity and time I have lost because I trusted Asus's warranty process.

My R40000 Asus M16 Rog Zephyrus was having problems soon after buying it. It was crashing under any load, multiple times a day. I don't know how it took 2.5 months for an Asus repair center to even 'reproduce the fault'. It crashes whenever you use it.

Asus directed me to take the laptop to Rectron. For a full month (!!!), Rectron fails to reproduce the error. The entire time I am emailing constantly trying to find out what on earth is going on. The laptop was crashing every single time I used it. How are they not able to reproduce this?

At this point I'm also emailing Asus and Evetech (who I bought it from).

Get this: Asus won't help me because they have no record of Rectron having the laptop. So, because they're own system is so broken, they won't intervene and help me navigate it. They say that I need to pick up the laptop from whoever it was that I dropped it off at (because they don't believe me that it was Rectron) and take it to an authorized repair center. They suggest: Rectron

I tell them that this is happening but they just refuse to acknowledge what's going on. I ask Rectron why Asus is saying this and they simply ignore me.

TIP: When trying to get a response from Rectron you need to email every day for a few days in a row otherwise they will simply not respond.

Evetech step in and rescue the laptop from Rectron/Asus. They immediately see that it is crashing and diagnose it. They send it to the other Asus-authorized repair center: Pinnacle.

My big mistake here was thinking that it was just Rectron that was utterly useless and dysfunctional, not the entire Asus service experience. I had been told that parts would take up to three weeks. So now I simply trusted that armed with knowledge of what was wrong with the machine, they would be able to diagnose it and order parts.

I admit, it was my mistake not to keep emailing constantly asking if they were actually doing something. This was naive of me.

After not hearing anything for three weeks I email Evetech asking for an update and they say they'll check in on progress. Lo and and behold! Nothing has happened. Exactly as was the case with Rectron, the laptop was simply sitting on a shelf somewhere with absolutely nothing happening. Apparently they had been hard at work for three weeks, unable to reproduce the fault.

I email Asus again. At this point I really just do not want to be held hostage by their dysfunction any longer. I just want my money back so that I can buy a working laptop that I can use to do my work. I have had to cut travels short because I could not bring my laptop with me. I have lost countless hours of work to loadshedding, because the laptop that I bought is simply sitting on a shelf somewhere. In retrospect, I would probably have been better off buying a new laptop and writing this one off.

They respond with the good news! Finally, after two and a half months! After countless emails from me begging for updates! The day had come, finally! They were writing me to let me know! They have managed to find the error! It turns out, get this, that the laptop crashes under load! Can you believe it?!

I would still strongly prefer getting my money back and buying a non-Asus laptop at this point. But they have denied 'credit' to Evetech to allow this.