While you will find me writing mostly about Android, apps, and occasionally, Vision Pro, I have been neck deep in gaming for years now. That’s why when I get to review gaming laptops like the MSI Stealth 14 Studio A13V; it brings me immense joy. So, when Colorful launched its Evol P15 series of laptops in India, I thought about making another review out of it. The lineup seemed so interesting that Beebom ended up purchasing this base variant from Flipkart. Little did we know that this Colorful laptop would only push us into a grayscale void of frustration. Here’s how things unfolded.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The variant was costing us just Rs. 62,539 with introductory bank offers and everything. Normally, the laptop goes for Rs. 69,990. It comes with the Intel Core i5 12th Gen 12450H CPU, 6GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD. All of this at that price was pretty unbelievable, in all honesty. So, we placed the order on April 25 and..
The Laptop Arrived on April 30 and It Wouldn’t Turn On
When it arrived, we just wanted to get through the setup as quickly as possible and get into gaming. But, guess what? The laptop wouldn’t turn on. So, as every person in such a situation would, we disconnected and reconnected the charger a gazillion times and even kept it connected for a while to try again later. Well, it didn’t work. It was officially time to replace the laptop, and on the same day (which is April 30), we placed the request on Flipkart.
Replacement Request Was Denied on May 1
A day later, a Flipkart representative arrived to initiate the replacement request. But, turns out that the serial number of the laptop we received didn’t match with the one listed on the invoice. What? Anyway, as a result, the replacement request was denied. However, after spending quite some time on the phone with Flipkart folks, they realized whose fault it was (I guess) and agreed to replace the product on 3rd May, and..
Replacement Laptop Arrived on May 6 But…
Having finally received the replaced unit, we started with our research and using the laptop extensively. The laptop worked great and brought immense value for money to the table. We ran benchmarks, played games, and did a whole lot of typing on a pretty solid keyboard. The design was also commendable and the build quality was pretty good for the price. Well, it all came crashing down on May 7.
Shashwat, one of our researchers, ran a couple of benchmarks and tests and once done, shut down the laptop. When he got back to it an hour later, the laptop booted into Windows Recovery Environment. Well, that’s most certainly never a good sign as it’s no less daunting than the Windows blue screen of death. However, that’s not the worst part.
Shashwat hit “Turn off the System” on the troubleshooting page and turned it back on to get hit with a “Default Boot Device Missing or Boot Failed” error page. Upon hitting OK here, we were taken to the BIOS homepage. Here, we could see that the SSD was intact and so was the data in it. Somehow, the laptop wasn’t able to boot Windows from it, which is beyond strange. Anyway, again, we were left with an unusable laptop.
It’s May 18 and We’re Still Left With an Unusable Unit
On May 7, we contacted the Colorful Service Centre and were told that our issue has been escalated to the brand and that a technician would come over to fix our laptop ASAP. However, we didn’t get an estimated date for that.
Two days later, on May 9, with no technician in sight, we contacted the brand’s service center again to follow up on our complaint. This is where things get painfully more interesting as the service representative stated that no complaint was registered by the number we used to contact them. Mind you, this is the exact same number we had used previously to file the complaint in the first place.
Anyway, providing a different number to file the complaint this time should be good enough right? Nope. Shashwat gave his number and to that, Colorful service center folks stated that a service request was apparently already placed with that number. We were baffled, to say the least, for there was no way this could have happened. So, either they’re making us go round in circles or, we’ve officially lost it.
Again, after a bit of talking about the issue and how this was anything but our fault, the service center agreed to file a new request. Even this time, they didn’t automatically provide us with a complaint ID. We had to specifically ask for one from them, and I’m still not sure how valid this so-called ID is.
I’m Disappointed, Colorful
While the complaint has been registered (hopefully) this time, I don’t exactly have a good feeling about it. We’ll probably end up returning the unit and getting the money back – something we haven’t had to do even with the shadiest of gadgets we’ve ever bought (and we have bought quite a few). Of the 13 days that the laptop has been delivered, we’ve only been able to use it for around a day, which is outrageously frustrating.
It’s May 18 and no one from Colorful has visited us to repair the laptop.
Such an experience from a brand that’s pretty well-known in the gaming circles (albeit for their GPUs), is unexpected, to say the least, and horrifying, if I’m being honest. It goes without saying that I won’t be recommending a not-so-Colorful laptop to anyone unless they want to risk witnessing a spectacular tech fail moment.
Anshuman Jain
Sagnik Das Gupta
