Overview

I'm just a customer of Crucial. But I'm also an IT guy with 17 years of experience in computers and systems. I have worked for some technology companies in Spain, and also for pharmaceuticals companies deploying their IT solutions and their IT strategy.

This blog is about how after 17 years of working with computers, components, peripherals and software of every brand, with plenty of support calls, returns of defective units, hundreds of hours dealing with buggy  products, for the very first time I've felt treated like an idiot and so pissed by a supplier that I've decided to not let it go and tell my story to everyone. That supplier is Crucial, a division of Micron.

Crucial Warranty is not warranty at all and their return service is negligent to say the least. Even their website support forms don't work as they should. Support people is as kind as in other companies, but seems to be too linked to internal procedures that finally they cannot do what they are supposed to do: bring solutions. Acceptable solutions.

This blog's purpose is double: of course it will allow me to vent my frustration with the way I have been treated by Crucial, but I also pretend to warn future Crucial customers of what they can expect from that company and its products, based on my experience.

My intention is to write the blog as a one-time story, so once the story will be told there will be no new entries. But if, like me, you are also an unsatisfied Crucial customer and want your story published here, I offer you this space to do so. Just contact me through the comments form with a contact email, and I will email you back.

Finally, if you think of buying a Crucial product I won't tell you not to do so, you are free. But I suggest you read this short story so you cannot say you wasn't warned when things start to go wrong with this company. And it is probably that they will go wrong. Just look at their support forums, specially the Warranty subforum... and I assure you that not every complain is there. A thread that I started to complain of the warranty conditions was removed, and also were removed some answers I posted trying to help other forum users that were asking why the support service didn't answer their RMAs authorization and how they could contact support. My post were removed because moderators said they were "not relevant". In a forum supposed to be the place to talk about Crucial products warranty and the procedures for using such a "warranty", they find "not relevant" to talk about why you're not satisfied with the options they gave you to solve a problem with a product with 16 months left of warranty, or ask why the return service people hasn't contacted you after you filled the RMA authorisation request tow week ago. I find that questions very relevant to the topic, "Crucial Products Warranty", and that's why I decided to write the story here, because here they cannot exercise censorship any longer.

The story of a warranty that wasn't actually a warranty at all

On 26th December 2012 I bought a 64 Gb Solid State Drive (SSD) from Crucial (aka Micron). The exact model was a V4 SSD.

I bought the SSD directly from their website, not from a dealer, so there are no intermediaries, and I bought this specific model because it was the one recommended by a wizard on their website: they ask you for the model of your computer and they tell you which SSD or memory part is compatible.

I paid €64,12 for the SSD.

From the very first day that the SSD was installed the drive was a pain. It was installed as system drive, with Windows XP SP3. The installation of XP took hours, and after the operating system was installed and the system rebooted, the system started to freeze and became laggy and unstable. My first impression with the unit was very bad, specially because it was supposedly a totally compatible model, recomended by Crucial itself. But hey, with new hardware sometimes you have to make some adjustments or tweaks, so I wasn't very concerned.

I went to the Crucial website, searched for Support, and found that they have a Support Forum. So I joined the Crucial Support Forums and, to my surprise, on the very firsts rows of the SSD Subforums there was already a thread called "Crucial V4 Freezes"... and it had 18 pages at that moment (January 2013)!!!

I read through the thread and my concern started to grow. People were complaining of freezes, lags, very bad benchmarks, problems with Windows Updates, problems installing all kind of programs... But there were also a couple of people telling that they have solved the issues with some tweaking of the system, or installing Windows 7 instead of XP. You can still find the thread here.

So, and this was my mistake, I decided to give the unit a chance, and started and odissey to workaround the problems. I know now that I should have returned the drive and ask for a refund of my money, but I thought it was not that much money, the return packaging and posting to UK will cost me €9, so... what if I give it a try?

I first tested the SSD with some benchmark tools (CrystalDiskMark, HDTune...) and it confirmed me that the numbers for the drive were not the ones publicized by Crucial on their website. Not even far. The 4k writes were specially awful, to say the least, and they sure will account for the lags anf freezes when installing anything on the drive. You can see the numbers below: 

Following the advice from the Crucial specialist in the forum, I performed the following actions and tweaks to my system:

- Changed BIOS mode to AHCI/RAID

- Updated to the latest SATA drivers

- Repartitioned the drive with Partition Magic tool.

- Aligned the partition to Mb, no cilynder.

- Changed SATA cable

- Changed SATA port

- Low level formatted the drive (many times)

None of the previous tweaks made big difference. After every low level format, creation of partition, alignment and reinstall of the OS the drive was, let say, OK for a couple of weeks, maybe three. But after that time, the freezes and lags started all over again, or one day after you powered on the computer the BIOS said there was no drive present, or it was present but couldn't boot, or... whatever problem.

To complete the picture, an analysis with HDTune (a program for testing hard drives and solid state drives) showed that the drive, with only weeks of use, had near to 2% of bad blocks!!!! On internet Crucial Forums some people were telling that these bad blocks were actually not bad at all. They were simply "blocked blocks" that the unit could not recover after a delete operation. I still was using Windows XP SP3, which I knew had some limitations to work with SSD. For example, XP doesn't have a "Trim" command to "clean" the unit of unused blocks. Instead, I had to use a technique recommended by Crucial called "Garbage Collection" that consisted in allowing the drive to clean itself overnight, removing the SATA data cable and letting it connected to power. A totally manual work that I had to perform every couple of weeks if I wanted to keep the drive working to a minimum.

I reformated, repartitioned, reinstalled again, and I got rid of those bad blocks. The unit was clean again and working well. Little more than a month had passed and I again thought of returning the drive, but as some posters said in the forum that the drive worked well after upgrading the firmware, I decided to do so.

So, again I:

- Upgraded firmware to FW25

- Create new partition

- Aligned partition

- Reinstalled everything

Well, this change made a difference... for a while. For a couple of months the drive worked better than usual. The benchmarks numbers where not impressive at all, but a little better tha before the upgrade, and at least the freezes and lags seemed to have gone. My illusion: after two and a half months the problems appeared again!! Tested the drive and there were more than a 2% of bad blocks. Nooooooo!!!!

So I decided to go for all and accept the last recommendation from Crucial specialist:

- Upgraded OS to Windows 7

- Created juction points to move programs temp files to another drive (HDD)

After upgrading my system to W7 and move temp files for W7, IE, Mozilla, Chrome, etc. to another drive, things were going very well. It seems that the Trim command was doing its job, and I used the drive for a couple of months without noticing problems. I really though that finally I had found the way to make this SSD work.

No way.

Freezes and lags reappeared. Again repartitioned, reformatted, reinstalled... everything. I was becoming a complete specialist in reinstalling systems. I almost could do it with my eyes closed.

This cycle of reinstalling happened at least four more times. Hey, Crucial cannot say I didn't give the unit a chance!!

But... even I have a limit. So tired of this, I contacted Crucial Support to RMA the drive. Hey, it had a 3 year warranty, doesn't it? It has only burn half of it warranty time by that moment, there were 16 months left of warranty, so let stop wasting time trying to do these unit work and replace it for another, because the problems should be of the unit itself.

And then, Crucial Support tells me that:

"Due to the evolving market and technological advances, this product is no longer part of our range and as such, an exchange for an identical drive is not available. Since our technical support and troubleshooting advice was unsuccessful, we are offering you a fair market value in-store credit or refund of € 11.86 ex.VAT– this takes into account the current value of the product, not the original purchase price and can be used to take advantage of our new product ranges on crucial.com."

Wait a minute... a €11,86 refund when there are 16 months left of warranty??? Sending the unit back to Crucial will cost me €9!!!! And, where does Crucial get that "fair maket value" from? I cannot see a single online store selling a 64Gb SSD for less than €35!!

It was supposed this unit has 3 years warranty, what kind of warranty is that one that doesn't offer other option than to  refund for a 1/6 of the purchasing price? The real meaning of "Limited three years waranty" seems to be you don't have a warranty at all. If the SSD instead of 16 months left would have 1 month left of warranty, what will have Crucial offered me for the drive? $0,01?

Unacceptable and unbelievable.

Crucial removed this model of the market in mid 2013, I'm sure that because they know it was a deffective model. You can judge by yoursel searching in the Crucial Support Forums for "V4", and see how many people experienced what I describe below. The product was absolutely faulty, and if Crucial were a serious company that takes care for its customer should have take responsability for putting in the market such a piece of junk and replace all the drives, not hide behind an abusive clause of their warranty.

After struggling with the unit for more than a year, spent more than 100 hours on it, it has been one of the worst pruchases I've ever made, and the answer from Crucial to a supposed warranty the worst I ever had with any merchant.

This is the way Crucial make bussiness. I will never ever buy from them again. And I'll take good care that my friends and customers don't be scammed by Crucial, either.

I also recommend any unsatisfied european Crucial customer, like me, to fill a complain in the European Consumer Centre website, as I've done:

http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/ecc/contact_en.htm

Crucial thinks that they can apply abusive clauses in their warranty, treat customers like idiots and get away with it.

Crucial should know that an unsatisfied customer costs way more than the price of a cheap unit. I just hope that some future Crucial customer read this before buying from them.

I am not going to say you not to buy from Crucial, you are free. But if you have read until here, you won't be able to say that you wasn't warned when things go wrong with Crucial. And they'll probably go wrong sooner or later, judging for how many complains there are about their products on the internet.

FIX Windows 7 "Unidentified Network - No internet access" error

I have been experiencing a very strange error in my home Windows 7 installation since the very first day I installed it. I have a Dell Vostro desktop PC with an ethernet Intel(R) 82562V-2 10/100 NIC, and I noticed that after some boot ups the Network Connection showed up with an warning icon (a small yellow triangle with an exclamation on it). Indeed this indicated there was a problem. The exact warning message was "Unidentified Network - No internet access". It seemed the problem was that the NIC could not determine which network I was using, although I already have a "Home" network properly configured that worked fine before the last boot, and as it could not determine which network I was using it simply didn't connect to it, so I had no LAN nor Internet connection.  Unplugging and plugging sometimes worked, other times it didn't and I had to reboot the machine, sometimes only to find that it had the problem again.

I googled for the problem and found many, many people experiencing this same problem with Windows 7. There were also many solutions proposed here and there, in forums and in the actual Microsoft Technet site. I tried everything, from uninstalling the driver to modifying the route tables (a "phantom" 0.0.0.0 route was accused of being the culprit) to change settings in the registry... nothing worked definitely, all of the mentioned solutions only worked temporarily or the didn't even worked. I was very surprised to see that this problem, even as it seemed to be affecting a lot of people, was not workarounded by Microsoft after many years of Windows 7 out there.

After many "tries and errors" I came to the conclusion that the best way for me to get rid of the error everytime it appeared was to go to "Network And Sharing Center", then click on "Adapter Settings", and then Disable the network connection and reenable it after some seconds. Sometimes this did the trick at first, sometimes I had to repeat this process 3-4 times before the network connection showed as "Connected".

One day a couple of months ago I had, as usual, the error on boot up. I started the mentioned method but after 9 or 10 cycles of disabling-enabling the connection it didn't connect. Then then they were 15 or 20 cycles... nothing. I decided it was too much and I have to get rid once and for all of that error (if I could get connection at last!). 

I always suspected, don't ask me why, that this problem could have some relation to the speed negotiation of the NIC. I decided to give a try to change the adapter's speed parameter and set it to manual, so the operating system didn't have to "guess" the speed of the adapter everytime the system booted up. So I forced the adapter to work in "Full Duplex at 100 Mbps".

It is two months now since I changed this setting and the problem has not come back a single day (it was showing up 2-3 times a week before), so I think the problem is solved at last, and I recommend you do the same if you are facing this same problem.

This solution, obviously, works fot a wired network connection. I don´t know if there is a similar workaround for wi-fi connections since I have not experienced this problem with wi-fi connectios.

So. to change the NIC adapter speed parameter follow this instructions:

- Go to "Control Panel"

- Go to "Network And Sharing Center"

- Go to "Adapter Settings"

- Right-click on the connection with the problem

- Click on "Properties"

That brings up the local area connection settings, as you can see in this image:

- Click on "Configure..."

- Click on "Advanced Options" tab

- In "Properties" section look for "Negotiation speed" and click on it

- In the right side, "Value" field, chose "Full Duplex at 100 Mbps" (or, in case you are connected to an old 10 Mbs switch, select "Full Duplex at 10 Mbps")

- Accept and close all the windows and restart

I hope this solution also works for you. Please leave me a comment if it did!!