Archives: December 2006

Acer Laptop Woes - part 7

Fri, 29/12/2006 - 11:18pm — tumbleweed

I have my laptop back. And I didn’t have to pay a cent to get it fixed (excluding my time, phone calls, faxes, and 2 months without it)

I got back from my Christmas Holiday at Arniston today, to find my laptop in a bag, waiting for me on the kitchen counter. The maid must have signed for it this morning.

My laptop is returned

It took me a while to get it to work nicely again (the first seating of my Atheros MiniPCI wifi card didn’t work), but I’m very happy to have it back again. I’ve really missed it (I know, it’s sad…) :-)

Thank you Acer.

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Wildlife in Constantia

Fri, 22/12/2006 - 5:08pm — tumbleweed

Went out the house to the car, and came across this in the driveway:

Crab in the driveway

God only knows where it came from :-)

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Acer Laptop woes - part 6

Fri, 22/12/2006 - 4:44pm — tumbleweed

Well, out of the blue this afternoon, while I was busy working on a client’s PC, I got a phone-call from someone at Acer head office. Finally my faxes there seem to be having some real affect.

“The warranty is only valid for one year, however, because you purchased a high end laptop, it shouldn’t fail. So as a courtesy to you we will fix it for you for free.”

Cool!

Thank you Acer, I knew you could do it :-)

It’s taken a while, to get this far, granted. But it sounds like I can actually get my laptop repaired entirely at Acer’s cost (after being without it for 2 months).

Now, lets see if they will courier it to me at Arniston, where I will be on holiday this week…

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More ClugPark work

Thu, 21/12/2006 - 3:01pm — tumbleweed

Well, we’ve now got a custom theme for http://park.clug.org.za/ (by superfly, thanks!) I still want to hack planetplanet to death, but that can wait until they decide on their direction…

In the meantime, I’ve been brushing up my mediawiki hacking for the ClugPark gallery. Mediawiki is a monster! The select query looks like this:

$select = "SELECT page_namespace, page_title, old_text, img_description "

          . "FROM " . $dbr->tableName(‘page’) . " "

          . "LEFT JOIN " . $dbr->tableName(‘revision’) . " ON page_latest = rev_id "

          . "LEFT JOIN " . $dbr->tableName(‘text’) . " ON old_id = rev_text_id "

          . "LEFT JOIN " . $dbr->tableName(‘image’) . " ON page_title = img_name "

          . "INNER JOIN " . $dbr->tableName(‘categorylinks’) . " "

          . "ON page_id = cl_from AND cl_to = " . $dbr->addQuotes($catKey) . " ";

$where = " WHERE page_namespace = " . $wgContLang->getNsIndex(‘Image’) . " "

         . "ORDER BY page_title ";

Yup. Lovely stuff. Anyway, when I’m happy with the extension, I’ll post it somewhere… (Same goes for my other mediawiki extenisons)

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Letter to Acer 3

Thu, 21/12/2006 - 2:34pm — tumbleweed

Gianfranco Lanci Acer Europe SA

RE: Extended Warranty not valid outside country of purchase.
RE: Repair Case XXXXXXXX
Pages: 2 (including this)

Dear Sir,

I faxed your of?ce on the 13th and 27th of November, concerning my Acer Ferrari 4005WMLi laptop (with an Acer Advantage Extended Warranty), that my UK employer bought me, out of my salary while I was working there. The laptop’s motherboard has failed, about 14 months after it was purchased. When I tried to get it repaired by Acer South Africa, they said that my extended warranty isn’t valid outside UK. I bought the warranty because I was explicitly told it would be valid Internationally (by the sales staff at Easy Computers).

You can read the rest of my previous faxes here: here and here

I sent my laptop into Acer South Africa for repair on 12 December, after getting a discount to R 2 250 from Dave Malherbe. I wanted the repair to be totally at Acer’s cost, but given that this had already taken a month to ?ght, I got tired and decided that R 2 250 was an acceptable price to end the pain. Dave organised the collection, and promised to make sure that I got my discount.

I never got any warning of when the courier would come to pick it up. I got home one morning, and they were waiting at the gate. It would have been nice to get some advance notice…

I got an SMS on the 13th, saying that it had been received in good order, and giving me a case number. And I’ve heard nothing since. The Acer Repair Status website has constantly said that my laptop is “Under Repair”.

Finally, today, I phoned the Technical Support line, surely changing a motherboard doesn’t take a week…

The agent informed me that Acer were waiting for me, and I’d been faxed a quote on the 14th of December. I recalled no fax, so I checked my fax-server’s logs, and I saw that while some faxes had been attempted to be received, they always resulted in errors. Thus I had absolutely no knowledge that Acer were waiting for me before proceeding with my repair.

I’ve since got hold of Dave’s boss, Deon, who informed that Dave is on leave in Dubai, and that my repair cannot proceed until he approves the quote.

This is unacceptable. The whole drama has lasted almost 2 months now. And I still don’t have a working laptop.

I think that your repair departments should call customers to tell them that Acer is waiting for their approval of the quote (especially when the customer’s fax machine never successfully receives the quote fax). Your repair department does a very good job with the “Your laptop has been received” SMS, why not continue the good service.

I have been blogging my laptop woes, so that others don’t get stuck in the same ruts that I have. As I said before, It’s not my intention to rage about how terrible Acer’s support is, but rather to warn others away from the nightmares I’ve had to deal with. I’ve highly recommended the Acer Ferrari 4000 to everyone who asked me about it (or high end laptops in general), and I hope that none of them ever have to deal with these kind of support issues.

I’d still like my laptop to be repaired at Acer’s expense, under warranty, in South Africa. I’d really like this to end amicably. I’m not enjoying life on my old substitute HP laptop very much, at all, and I’d love to have my Ferrari back in working condition.

Sincerely,

Stefano Rivera

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Acer Laptop woes - part 5

Thu, 21/12/2006 - 1:53pm — tumbleweed

I’ve been checking Acer’s website often, looking for any update on my laptop repair. It just constantly says “Under Repair”.

Well, after waiting weeks and hearing nothing back from Acer, I called them…

Oh, apparently they faxed me a quote the day after they got the laptop :-(

I don’t remember any fax…

I checked my faxserver logs:

Dec 14 20:51:59 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: STATE CHANGE: RUNNING -> LISTENING

Dec 14 20:51:59 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: STATE CHANGE: LISTENING -> ANSWERING

Dec 14 20:52:05 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: ANSWER: FAX CONNECTION  DEVICE ‘/dev/ttyS1’

Dec 14 20:52:23 localhost FaxGetty[23714]: RECV FAX (000002195): recvq/fax000002099.tif from Fax Server, route to <unspecified>, 0 pages in 0:18

Dec 14 20:52:25 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: RECV FAX (000002195): session with Fax Server terminated abnormally: T.30 T2 timeout, expected page not received

Dec 14 20:52:25 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: RECV FAX: bin/faxrcvd "recvq/fax000002099.tif" "ttyS1" "000002195" "T.30 T2 timeout, expected page not received" "" ""

Dec 14 20:52:35 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: MODEM ROCKWELL RC288DPi/V2.200-K56_DLS

Dec 14 20:52:35 localhost FaxGetty[2802]: STATE CHANGE: RECEIVING -> RUNNING (timeout 30)

etc. I got them to re-send, and the same thing… You’d think they could check their fax system some time (I know that I have no problems on my end) or maybe make their status website say something useful like “awaiting go-ahead from client” instead of “Under Repair”…

And how about phoning me and saying, “did you receive our fax?”. They had a very good system for SMSing me when they got my laptop, so surely they can keep up the good work on contact?

So I called back again, and after having my brain curdled by some incredibly bad hold-music, I tried to get my past contact, Dave Malherbe. He is away in the Dubai (good for him)… I spoke to his manager, Deon, and he said that I have to wait until he can get Dave to approve the quote. Lovely!

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Phone SPAM again

Tue, 12/12/2006 - 3:21pm — tumbleweed

“Do you need cash in a hurry?”

At 15:14. I got another phone call from Plantinum. The first thing that I got from the woman was a contact number: 086 711 1660

I asked to speak to her boss, but she said he was out. Funny that. When I asked to leave a message, I was hung up on.

The phone call didn’t last for very long… :-(

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Vodacon

Tue, 12/12/2006 - 2:47pm — tumbleweed

Here’s a screenshot from the LG Chocolate website:

Screenshot from the LG Chocolate website

Anyone detect a Freudian slip?

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Acer Laptop woes - part 4

Tue, 12/12/2006 - 12:58pm — tumbleweed

Well, I got home this morning to find a courier waiting outside my door to collect my laptop.

So, it’s all packed off to Acer. Lets hope I see it again, preferably in working condition :-)

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ClugPark

Tue, 12/12/2006 - 10:27am — tumbleweed

I’ve been doing some themeing work on Clug Park, and it’s pretty much ready to go now. It could still do with some theming work, and probably some more blogs (I bet there are other blogging CLUGgers out there).

It seems that PlanetPlanet might switch to an entirely re-written version of it’s software. That shouldn’t be a problem, I think the themes are still compatible.

We’ve hacked our planet to always display 2 entries from every member. If we switch, the hack will have to be ported. Which isn’t a bad thing, I don’t want to pass the patch upstream if planetplanet is about to switch to another trunk, anyway :-)

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Google Webmaster Tools

Mon, 11/12/2006 - 7:47pm — tumbleweed

After reading the slashdotted google hacked sites fiasco, I (and by the look of it, the rest of the Internet) decided to check out Google Webmaster tools.

Verifying all my sites was a pain (the verification server probably got slashdotted, and when it was working, it wasn’t resolving DNS properly), and took about a week. But now that that’s over, it gives me some useful info. It really helps, to get a view of your site, as google sees it.

Most of the use for me, is the Preferred Domain tool (i.e. make google prefer www.yoursite.com over yoursite.com), and the Site Content tool.

I’ll look into sitemaps another time :-)

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Bad postmasters

Fri, 08/12/2006 - 1:56pm — tumbleweed

OMFG, I just received a bounce from an e-mail I sent 6 months ago.

The mail was written to postmasters, complaining about their MTA’s not understanding 45x codes. Sounds like that is just the beginning of their problems…

/me wonders if that “lost connection” was 6 months ago, or ran for 6 months before it got lost…

This is the Postfix program at host gs-smta-01.broadbandscope.net.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

<postmaster@mail.sfd.co.uk>: lost connection with mail.sfd.co.uk[81.140.0.66] while sending message body

From: Stefano Rivera <XXXXX@rivera.za.net>
Subject: Misconfigured mailservers (greylist incompatible)
To: postmaster@sfd.co.uk, postmaster@mail.sfd.co.uk, postmaster@broadbandscope.net
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 15:47:17 +0200
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

Sorry, but you guys have no technical contact listed anywhere, so I just mailed all the relevant postmasters.

Your outgoing mail servers don’t seem to retry mail when they get temporary errors (45x series). The problem servers for me were gs-mta-04.broadbandscope.net [81.140.160.226] and gs-mta-03.broadbandscope.net [81.140.160.225].

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Athlon 64 Shortage

Wed, 06/12/2006 - 2:59pm — tumbleweed

There seems to be a shortage of single core AMD Athlon 64 processors at the moment. All the suppliers blame it on AMD-ATI merger….

I finally found one at Sahara, and so signed up with them. (Yes, I know they have a bad reputation with returns, but all the suppliers have those). The message from my sales consultant contained 11 disclaimers. You’d think one would suffice, or maybe even zero (my personal favourite), but no, 11… I really enjoy the variations in formatting :-)

Enjoy your day.

Any enquiries contact me

XXX YYYY

Sales Consultant

XXXX@cpt.sahara.co.za

021 551 5595 /Ext. XXX

Fax: 0866077368

PLEASE NOTE

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Sahara Distribution (Pty) Ltd. Finally, while Sahara Distribution attempts to ensure that all email is virus-free, Sahara Distribution accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email.

Sahara Distribution (PTY) Ltd Private Bag X180, Halfway House, 1685, South Africa