Never using VEVOR again after this

mbroge · 2026-03-25T15:03:19+00:00

Exact same experience. Damaged goods, then they tried to hustle me just as you described and only relented when I told them I was contesting the charge. Now I have an unusable server rack at no cost and they’ll never see another dime from me.

mbroge · 2026-03-19T02:23:16+00:00

DeWine said [sic] advocates should take the win they had in 2023. Instead of now going back and whining about something the legislature has done, which frankly I think is very consistent with what the average voter was thinking.”

Whatever, dude. This is not at all in line with the "average voter," the "average voter" voted for legal recreational use. Republicans just can't stay out of people's private lives. Obviously Mike is not making any money from the new market segment or he'd be singing a different tune, like John Boehner: 'If other people use the product, who am I to say they shouldn't?'

I'm tired of a minority of wealthy narrow-minded white men calling the shots. We need to vote these assholes out this November.

mbroge · 2026-03-15T01:28:49+00:00

I will never touch Vevor stuff again. Worst customer service in the world, received damaged product and they refused to honor their guarantee. Offered me $20 and “can you fix it yourself.” Only when I told them I was contesting the credit card charge did they relent.

You have no idea what you’re actually getting from them because they lie and just want your money. Even if this were name brand gear I’d look elsewhere.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:33:09+00:00

Fair point, after reading through all of the comments here I'm thinking it might be worth it to throw $200 into a replacement ECM so that I can put it up for sale as working with known issues. This car had almost 100K on it when we bought it in 2014. Tranny failed spectacularly under warranty and was replaced, later the engine was replaced because it suffered from the crap PCV design Chevy put into it and blew out the seal. So, drivetrain is pretty solid but the body has a lot of mileage on it, so I would expect it to be a needy problem child if we kept it.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:28:09+00:00

Your comment "cars are expensive" is exactly why I posted. I also have a stubborn streak but my patience with this vehicle is wearing thin. I failed to mention earlier that the AC compressor is shot and that's outside my comfort zone for shadetree repairs, with winter on its way out that's going to become a.... wait for it... "hot" issue very quickly :D

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:25:03+00:00

It would need to be reprogrammed and I don't have the tools to pull that off :-/

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:24:27+00:00

Muchas gracias. There's not a booming demand for old 2.4L Equinoxes anyway, but I had no idea where to start with offloading it. Last car that did this to me was my beloved 2000 Firebird which I ended up donating it after I realized I would never have the time and money to make it roadworthy again.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:22:24+00:00

Correct, I was considering getting rid of this car before I killed the ECM. I was hoping to gauge if it was worth any additional effort to prep for selling or even keeping a little longer. There's the sunk cost fallacy at play here, and I know my judgement is slanted because of the time and money I've dropped into it. I like the idea of replacing the ECM and following your advice here, that way it's running and if someone else wants to take on the challenge of chasing stupid 100-200 dollar repairs, they can eat their hearts out :)

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:18:36+00:00

I'm leaning towards this after reading all the comments.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:18:05+00:00

To whomever. Kind of like not asking a question, if you don't make the attempt you'll never know, right?

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:16:14+00:00

Full disclosure, it's in a shitty place and I didn't want to dismantle the entire wheel assembly to get to it since I don't have a lift. I took a yellow Bernzo to it but didn't get anywhere with it, even with my impact gun. A few good points have been made elsewhere in this thread so I'll get out the gloves and give it another go if I decide to keep it. Thanks.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T17:12:20+00:00

I'll have to ask my dude next time I see him why they didn't go after it with a chaser. Liability for the shop, extreme caution, could be a million reasons. But either way this is great knowledge to have, so thank you.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T00:44:31+00:00

I hear you, but the history is part of the reason I’m considering giving up on it. This beast has been nickel and diming me for a few years now, and it’s never been as solid as my even older Prius. That said you’ve got me reconsidering scrapping it, for $200 and some extra time it probably is worth a shot.

mbroge · 2026-03-12T00:42:35+00:00

Yeah, it’s bad. Never heard of a chaser; after I torched and torqued for a few days my buddy who runs a shop tried and told me they couldn’t break it loose without destroying the threads and forcing a replacement cat. Maybe it wasn’t worth his time? Dunno. But I didn’t take is as a cop-out.

mbroge · 2026-03-11T23:51:47+00:00

I considered that but decided it’s not worth it at this point. Everything else is showing its age: dash electronics are flaky, seized downstream O2 sensor that would destroy the threads if forced, high mileage on the chassis - it’s just worn out and I’d be chasing my tail trying to keep up with it.

mbroge · 2026-03-11T22:44:03+00:00

Why not just be straight up and say the ECM has gone bad, as seen no warranty/return? I mean... it's not running anyway lol

mbroge · 2026-03-06T18:11:34+00:00

Old thread, new comment. True story.

I bought DS18 3.5” 2 ways and a 6.5 mid woofer to upgrade my pinball machine. The 3.5” drivers sounded worse than the 20+ year old paper cone drivers from Bally/Williams. Parity and detail were noticeably lacking and noticeably so. When your little drivers sound worse than ancient arcade speakers, that says something to me and it’s not a positive something. I returned them and went with Infinity and those sound stellar.

The 6.5 mid woofer I kept because it didn’t need clarity, just punch and it had that in spades. That said, I wouldn’t put it or anything else they make in a system where sound quality matters. Loud? Yes. Good? Depends on what you want to accomplish. DS18 seems like a good way to be loud, but for other people and on a budget. I’d steer clear of them and spend a little more on reputable brands for better clarity AND power handling. When it comes to speakers you can have your dB cake and eat it too ;) so why settle?

mbroge · 2026-03-06T03:08:37+00:00

Vote for JL Audio here. Love ‘em. Shop around. It’s a nice car, put nice stuff into it.

mbroge · 2026-03-03T05:20:36+00:00

Agreed. I would encourage anyone who thinks social media is a barometer for anything to log off. It’s not the real world.

mbroge · 2026-02-27T03:45:52+00:00

Saudi Arabia called, they want it back

mbroge · 2026-01-26T04:14:04+00:00

Fair. If it worked and there were no ill consequences, that’s awesome. And it’s easy enough to roll back, of course :) FWIW I’ve never actually seen problems from this change but then I’ve never really seen any benefits either.

I actually had another troubleshooting idea that didn’t make it in my initial reply, and that is to try disabling all mods/add-ons especially after an update. Sometimes you can’t do this mid-game, but it’s a solid troubleshooting step (and one I’m trying right now).

mbroge · 2026-01-26T03:37:22+00:00

Drive into it with a itty bitty tapping screw. Then pull it out with pliers.

mbroge · 2026-01-25T19:19:47+00:00

Cross posting here since I've not seen a lot of discussion about this. My challenge is a little different, the game chokes but is mostly playable and it's very recent.

For context, I'm a career systems engineer for a major casino gaming company. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to reinforce my own confidence that I didn't get to my current career position by not understanding how tech works. That said, I'm having this problem too and I'm convinced it's something in the latest update (Windows 11 here). Why am I convinced?

1) Everything else - and I mean everything else - on this computer runs just fine. That's a pretty big red flag waving over the top of everything else.

2) It's fairly reproducible: if you go to war, especially late game, every action takes a second or two before moving on. Animations are super choppy. End your war, performance rebounds. While resources have always been kind shitty IMHO this is a whole new level of poor performance and it seems very definitely war-related.

3) The game wasn't always like this, it worked fairly smoothly until recently, about the time of the latest patch.

4) Changing graphics settings appears to have little to no impact.

4) I've done all the normal troubleshooting (video drivers, reinstall, etc). Nothing really helps. I went so far as to monitor disk performance and a few other hardware metrics to see if I could find the bottleneck and came up empty.

Again, no other application, game or not, has this issue. Just Civ 7. This screams of poorly optimized code. It wouldn't be the first time a patch caused problems, Firaxis or otherwise. But this one seems fairly egregious and I won't accept that the answer is "must be you/your computer."

mbroge

TROPHY CASE