Wednesday, September 19 2007, 11:02 PM

Well, my TV is finally fixed. It only took about three and a half months, but it's finally fixed. The repair tech come by on Friday and did the repair. I was right too... I watched him do the replacement, and I could have easily done it in the span of about twenty minutes. It took him a bit longer, because he was having trouble getting the back panel to fit back in place like it was.

In any case, it's fixed now, and hopefully for good.

polaroid-3211-tlxb

Wednesday, August 22 2007, 12:00 PM

Apparently the girl I talked to last week wasn't as much of an expert technician as she seemed... I got the parts delivery from Polaroid today, and well... yah.

Apparently the "control module" is Polaroid's way of describing "everything except the screen and plastic case". There's only two or three connectors that connect the module to the LCD and power, so I could easy replace this if I wanted. I have no desire to void my warranty though, so I'm going to let an 'expert' do it. Hopefully Polaroid follows up like they said they would and schedules a repair appointment. I'd like to have my TV back.

polaroid-3211-tlxb

Sunday, August 19 2007, 1:09 PM

I've been going back and forth with Polaroid over the past week, and my TV still isn't fixed. I am making progress though.

I called customer support last saturday, figuring that I could just wait on hold with my bluetooth headset while I was cleaning my apartment. After about 20 minutes waiting in their phone queue, I got through to one of the most clueless support reps I had ever dealt with. I described the situation with all the relevant details - how my TV had died about a month after I bought it, and had been at the shop for two months, and how it was now back at home. I told her that the repair place had sent the TV back to me without making any effort to fix it because they couldn't get any information from Polaroid about parts or service manuals, and that someone from Polaroid just told them to send it back to me. The last point needed some clarification, because she asked me at least three times whether the repair place had fixed it or not. After she placed me on hold for about five minutes, she came back online, obviously unconfident in what she was saying. She said that she had to get in contact with her supervisor, and that he would call the repair shop for ther confirmation of the events, and then call me back, most likely on monday. I thanked her, and set off for more waiting.

Monday came and went with no call from Polaroid. I called them back on Tuesday and had to completely reexplain the situation because there was no record of my call on saturday, or of the promise to give me a call back. I explained what happened, and the girl I talked to was utterly unconvinced that the repair shop was being honest with me because "Polaroid would never offer an exchange for a TV that hadn't even been repaired yet." Apparently a TV would need to be repaired at least two times before they would even consider an exchange. I said that was fine, but also explained that I needed a resolution to this, since my TV had been out of commission for three out of the four months that I've owned it. Apparently she was an expert technician as well as a customer service rep, because she was able to diagnose the exact part I needed from my description of the problem. She said that Polaroid would be mailing a new control module to me, and that they would schedule a visit with a different repair service to come to my apartment and fix the TV with the new part. This makes me a bit hopeful, but not really.

We'll see what happens in the next week or two.

frustrations polaroid-3211-tlxb

Friday, July 27 2007, 12:26 AM

What a pain in my ass. For those not in the loop, my TV is STILL gone. It's been at the repair shop for two months. It seems that my intution was correct on that one. The shitty part is that the delays are completely Polaroid's fault, and not that of the repair company. I've been in somewhat regular contact with the repair shop, and the story was always the same - they called Polaroid requesting service manuals and part numbers, but Polaroid just gave them the run-around. They never got any of the information or materials they needed to fix the TV.

Apparently, the repair shop will never receive the stuff they needed. In the latest of many attempts, the lady at the repair shop was trying to contact Polaroid to get information, and they sang a different tune. Polaroid told the repair people not to fix the TV, but to return it to me instead. I'm supposed to now call the Polaroid customer service people back and arrange for an exchange or refund. I can't say which I would rather take. If I could somehow get an upgrade, that would be great. I'm not sure if I want another Polaroid TV though... if all of their TVs are of the same quality level, I might want to stay as far away from them as I can.

This apparently affects many people other than me as well. The lady said that she had multiple broken Polaroid TVs at her shop alone that needed to be sent back to customers for the same reasons as mine. I guess that serves as a good warning to stay away from newer Polaroid TVs, especially the 3211-TLXB.

frustrations polaroid-3211-tlxb

Monday, June 11 2007, 3:10 PM

The past few weeks have been a lot of the same old same old. A few noteworthy events have happened though.

About two weeks ago, I noticed a strange smell in my car. I couldn't place it, and it wasn't very strong, so I ignored it and went to work. A few hours later, when I went to grab something out of my car, I noticed the smell again. I looked around, and found the source. I had left a gallon of milk in the trunk. It sat there for two or three days I figure, plenty long enough to go bad in the hot summer sun. It had leaked about a quarter to a third of its fluid components out into the trunk lining, and it smelled pretty bad. I immediately threw it away, and used a hose at work to wash the trunk lining out the best I could. The crappy thing is that it leaked down into the piece of fiberboard that seperates the trunk from the spare tire compartment. It soaked in there, and I couldn't really clean it. I gave it a good dousing with febreeze, and that seemed to do the trick for a few days, but I've been noticing that the smell is returning. It's not really bad, and can be easily subdued by opening a window or turning on the HVAC fans. It still stinks though (pun intended). Hopefully the bacteria will run out of raw materials soon, and the smell will go away on its own.

Last week, my brand new TV decided to die. I was attempting to plug my laptop into the VGA connector to see how things looked, but the TV shut itself off before I could enable the external VGA out on the laptop. This is normal behavior when a VGA signal can't be found. What isn't normal behavior is that the TV won't power on now. I called Polariod tech support, and the customer service rep seemed genuinely surprised about it. I can't blame him, because it makes no sense. It has to be some sort of buggy firmware or something similar, becuase there's no reason why a TV should power itself off, and then refuse to power on again, unless it's expressing a hatred of Star Trek or something. The customer support guy got in contact with a local repair company, and they'll be out tomorrow to have a look at it. With my recent luck with home theater components, it'll be broken, and the repair people will have it for a few months. Grand. It's less than two months old.

I also really need to stop browsing eBay. It's a really bad idea. The purchases I made last month had more of an effect on my bank account that I realized at the time. Lesson learned I suppose.

ebay frustrations grandprix polaroid-3211-tlxb

Monday, April 30 2007, 2:08 AM

More news regarding cool new stuff. My old TV has been going south for, well, like 5 years. It used to belong to my grandmother, and it came to me quite a while ago. It's been getting pretty bad lately, so I decided to take my income tax money and get a new TV. I initially planned to get a new standard definition TV with a digital tuner, but I found a 32" LCD TV (Polaroid 3211-TLXB) on sale for a reasonable price. It's got all of the inputs that I was looking for - VGA, HDMI, and Component. My DVD player doesn't seem to output a good Component signal, so I'm stuck with using S-Video for now. Oh well, I'll live.

I also need to stop going to eBay. The server I bought is working quite well, but my tendency as an impulse spender could easily get the best of me. I already bought two more servers. One is a dual P3 1Ghz with six 36GB SCSI drives that I bought mostly for the SCSI drives. The other is a Quad P3-level Xeon machine with 2GB of RAM. Having a quad-CPU machine just sounded cool. While I was looking through some of the eBay stores, I found an external twelve drive RAID enclosure that would connect perfectly to the dual P3 machine. I shouldn't buy it since I don't really need it, but it would be cool. Someone stop me!

compaq dl580 ebay hp lc2000r netserver polaroid-3211-tlxb

Related Tags