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Another guy was so rude that I asked to speak to his manager. He told me I'd have to hang up and call back to get someone else, and ask to speak to their manager.
Wow just wow.
At this point I would have sent it back and issued a chargeback.
Another guy was so rude that I asked to speak to his manager. He told me I'd have to hang up and call back to get someone else, and ask to speak to their manager.
Wow just wow.
At this point I would have sent it back and issued a chargeback.
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I used to work at Compaq in Singapore and it was well known in Asian circles that Acer made the absolute cheapest (as in worst) laptops on the market and appalling customer service. I see that their standard has not risen a bit since then.
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I'm not sure if you have a similar law over there, but in CA, manufacturer's are required to extend their warranty to cover the time the item was in repair. May be worth looking into.
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I'm on an Acer and it's been a great laptop. ::knocks on wood::
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The only Acer product I've owned is my current 19\" LCD monitor which I absolutely love and have experienced no problems with. I wonder if someone stateside would have had any better luck with this..
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I actually have to wonder how Acer stays in the laptop manufacturing business. I can understand how they operate in the manufacturing of accessories but it's been their laptop manufacturing brand which makes me wonder how they stay in business. Must be licensing...
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Who buys Acer products?
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Wow that's unbelievably sucky.
i bought an Acer 9300 laptop 17\", nice specs, XP MCE. Never Again. It seemed to thrive on BSOD. They replaced the motherboard and hard drive - was good for a while. I think the turion 64x2 TL-50 processor has something to do with the instability. When it works, it is great. Buyer Beware
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We bought one, an Acer Aspire with a Sempron 2800+ processor, and a gig of ram. Overheat, crash. Overheat, crash. Acer \"fixed\" it a half-dozen times. At one point, I was told that it was dangerous to actually put 1 gig of ram in the thing, because it wasn't really built to hold it. (Manual says capacity is 3 gigs...)
I got tired of dealing with it, and bought a Thinkpad that's given no trouble. The Acer's a spare, hopefully for surfing and unimportant things. If an important family computer goes down for an extended period, I unbox an old 300 mhz Win98SE machine...
So far (1 month) my Acer laptop has been great, but I don't know how long it will last...
@howie_in_az: No, you wouldn't have, because chargebacks can only be issued 60 days after the date the charged appeared on the statement.
What you might have been able to do is take up the issue with your credit card - many credit cards extend / double manufacturers warranties, and they will make good when the manufacturer doesn't.
On that note, I've got an acer 7720 here that I've loaded up with 4gb and an extra hard drive, not a bit of trouble and running Vista x64. I haven't had to use their service yet, but from working back at best buy years ago (when Pentiums didn't have numbers after the name) I can tell you that Acer has many divisions - sometimes two per region/country, and support varies wildly from division to division.
@larrybike: You need to consider something; in the 25 years I've been dealing with laptops and desktops, I've never been impressed with any 3rd party AMD chipsets.
Ever since AMD got out of the chipset business in 2001 or so, the supporting sets (Via, now mostly NVIDIA) generally are geared more towards speed versus stability.
Every AMD laptop I've used (and the same does not go for desktops) starts getting unstable when you're not running absolutely stock.
This isn't a knock on AMD (although they do have some catching up to do as of late) - but a lot of manufacturers don't quite take into account the much wider tolerances in power, memory speed, and thermal parameters that AMD processors have needed especially in a mobile situation, and 2nd-tier asian manufacturers seem particularly bad. That goes for Sony too, by the way. They still don't \"get\" cooling a mobile machine.
That being said - another snafu a lot of people run into with Acer is that (lame) their cooling is NOT handled by their BIOS. They use there Empowering Technology Framework software (again, lame) to monitor and do thermal management. If you wipe and reformat and don't install this, you're in bluescreenton, KY. Same goes for running linux without some clever scripts out there..
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Imagine, just imagine if this was a MacBook and Apple did 1/10 of as poor a job as this.
The PC fanboys would be climbing the walls.
A PC mfr does it, and it draws largely giggles, shrugs and patient explanations.
Sigh.
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Uh oh. My laptop, also an Acer, needs warranty work as the Bluetooth & Media reader have never worked since I got it. I hope I don't have the problems this guy had.
@tcp100:
The first thing I did with my Acer laptop (Aspire 3100) was wipe it & reformat it. With an HP XP Pro OEM CD. The power management *is* in the BIOS & works just fine. Actually, for all it's hardware faults (see above), my Aspire is rock stable.
My Acer Aspire did have an overheating problem. I bought one of those notebook cooling mats and its just fine now.
But its working well otherwise. I paid very little for it and so long as it lasts me a year, I'll be happy.
But I won't buy another one!
i am responsible for over 400 Acer desktop/laptops. That is all we use. Im sure every company has faults but as far as maintaining this many computers i couldnt have asked for any better. We still have Acer 4100 Windows 98 machines that run 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.
\"How these guys stay in business if beyond me.\"
That's easy. They took over IBM's ThinkPad manufacturing. With a well trusted name under their belt, they were able to secure the loyalty of many American businesses. With so many enterprises hopelessly devoted to the ThinkPad, it's fairly easy to stay in business. Besides, their main business is overseas in Japan. They care not for the frustrations of us fat, lazy Americans. They have just enough loyal customers here in the States to make them appear on-par with American manufacturers.
Besides, certain companies (I'm looking at you, DELL and GATEWAY!) don't exactly cast a sunny spot on American manufacturing quality anymore...
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After working for a company that sold only Acer and Open products I can tell you this doesn't surprise me. I think I would rather have hemorrhoids removed with a chainsaw then have to deal with their support ever again. HP is a close second.
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Not that it excuses Acer's actions, or lack thereof, but I remember my friend going to Circuit City to get deals for auctions that he held, and seeing that they were trying to give the Acer laptops away with a 12-month sign-up of AOL, and they were simply not worth the $120.
@Trai_Dep: If Apple didn't go with Wintel chips, we WOULD be climbing the walls to come over to them.
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@blackmage439: Wasn't Lenovo the one who took over the IBM laptop division?
Because every thinkpad on the company, while still showing the IBM logos, all say lenovo.
better late than never!