Warranty and Service questions

[PiggyMiddle]

Hi, a friend just emailed he has bought an SPro2. It has a dead digitizer that he is OK with, but everything else works fine so far. (I have a Pro 3 - awesome thing)

His System page shows Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Russian phone numbers for support. Sounds like it is an Asian or Southern Hemisphere model, or something. He is happy enough with it, but asked me what I thought about warranty.

I told him to call msoft, but thought I would post here as someone may have already been down this road. I assume the warranty is still good here, if there is any left on it. How do we check on that?

But, the bit he had not thought about was if service is ever needed, will he have to ship it back to the land down under?

Thanks

 

[Eren68]

I'm in the UK and my Surface Pro was a USA refurb. I called Microsoft with the same concerns and they informed me the warranty is fully valid in the UK. The tech went on to say the warranty is global ONLY if
Microsoft Surface has a legitimate presence in your residential country.

To check the remaining warranty, try registering the device with Microsoft online.

 

[PiggyMiddle]

Thanks, might all be moot. Got a panic call this morning saying it needs Activation. It has showing "Activated" since he got it, but yesterday afternoon he did the warranty check, which by the way was 7/2015. This morning at turn on, it is no longer activated. I told him to call msoft and all they would say is "buy a copy of windows for a new activation Key"

Not good news.

 

[Eren68]

Ouch. Surely there is a way to tell if the activation key is original to that device? If it isn't, it's definitely worth purchasing a new key given the amount of warranty remaining. I can't believe that doing a warranty check would cause his issue but the warranty is peace of mind. This activation thing was a frequent occurrence on Win 7 and you just needed to re enter your original code. I installed Magic Jellybean to retrieve mine.

 

[PiggyMiddle]

Being somewhat anally retentive, I told him to do a full image backup the day he got the thing. I have now wrestled the SP2 into letting me reinstate that image along with the Activation state current at that time. It seems to be OK again, but will wait the four days it took for it to pop up "Please Activate," that last time. The friend may have been messing with something he should not have been messing with. He says he wasn't, but...

Time will tell, but so far I have saved him $92 for a CD.

It sucks that msoft will not tell us the Activation Key after logging in and giving us the warranty info that needed the serial number. I can't believe they don't store that with the s/n. But, hey, it IS after all, msoft. Not the brightest bunch of programmers out there.

 

[Eren68]

He says he wasn't, but...

That quote is priceless and is the most common response

 

[yeewiz]

He probably was ...

He may have tried to install something which overwrote the original product key. I had something similar happen to me. I unfortunately tried to install a previously used Media Center Pack on my working SP2. The product key of the Media Pack overwrote the original SP2 Win 8 product key and I got the repeating activate product key message. The original product key is burned into the SP2 but the only way to go back to the original product key is to do a system reset.