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…

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:

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

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

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:

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!

“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… :-(