Laptops Held Hostage Amid Spat, NEC Says

Hundreds of NEC laptop users who sent their computers in for repair have had the machines held hostage in a business dispute between Packard Bell NEC and Cerplex Group, an Irvine-based company under contract to fix the machines.

Sacramento-based Packard Bell directed the customers to send the Ready line of commercial laptops, which were made by another contractor, to a repair facility run by Cerplex in Livermore, Calif.

Since a billing dispute arose between the companies, Cerplex has refused to release about 400 laptops, according to Packard Bell spokesman Ron Fuchs.

“The two sides disagree over who paid who when,” Fuchs said. “Unfortunately, in this instance, customers were trapped in the middle of it.”

One of the frustrated customers, J’Amy Brown of Santa Barbara, mailed her $2,000 Ready 340T laptop to Livermore on Sept. 28 to get the screen replaced.

Packard Bell told her the job would take 10 days. Then it was three weeks.

The next time she called the company, “they said, ‘You’re not getting it back. We’ve had a disagreement with the service people, and they’ve confiscated the equipment,’ ” Brown said.

Brown, who depends on the machine for e-mail and presentations in her public relations business, phoned everyone she could think of at the company.

On Friday, she received a lesser machine from NEC as a loaner. But the loaner doesn’t have Brown’s data and isn’t configured for her communications.

“It’s been a month that I haven’t been able to pick up my e-mail,” she said.

Fuchs said Packard Bell has arranged for new systems to be sent to about 100 of the aggrieved consumers. “We’ve tried to do the right thing,” he said.

Fuchs said the dispute apparently isn’t about repair bills. Those are handled between Cerplex and the consumer or, if the repairs are covered under warranty, between Cerplex and the contractor that made 50,000 of the machines for Packard Bell, he said.

Instead, the fight involves another East Coast business deal between the companies, Fuchs said.

Cerplex is a publicly traded company that has lost money in each of the last four years. It also contracts to fix machines for several other major technology manufacturers, including Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems.

Several Cerplex executives, including President Richard Alston and Chief Executive Larry McTavish, didn’t return telephone calls Friday, and another hung up after refusing to comment.

Fuchs said NEC laptop owners with problems are now being directed to a different repair shop.

And he said negotiations over the core financial disagreement and the captive machines continue.

“The rest we hope to have released shortly,” he said. “It is our position that they were not legally seized.”