Stefano's World

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.

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.

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…

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:

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!

“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… :-(

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 :-)

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].

I’ve heard back from my contact at Vodacom. (cough smitty cough):

I have looked at this clients complained and have established the following: We have in the passed received similar complained from this company (Platinum) Firstly they are not a WASP service so they don’t need to comply as stated. They are a company that do sales and use random cell phone ranges prefixes 082 445 xxxx to SMS clients or call randomly. If the client wants to stop them from contacting him, he needs to call then and advise them accordingly.

Platinum 0219441600

Regards

Sounds like they are from Cape Town, (but north of the borewors curtain).

So, I phoned them… Naturally, I ended up at a voicemailbox (for extension 1649), so I asked to be called back. Lets see…

If I don’t hear from them, next stop is the Ombudsman for financial services.

Gianfranco Lanci
Acer Europe SA

RE: Extended Warranty not valid outside country of purchase.
Pages: 1 (including this)

Dear Sir,

I faxed your office on the 13th 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 fax here

I’ve since heard from Dave Malherbe of Acer South Africa, who told me that your office had authorised reducing the cost of repairs from R6 099 to R4 400. That’s hardly much of a discount, and I could still buy an entire new laptop for less than that. After a few phone-calls back and forth, he even agreed to drop it to R2 250, on condition that Acer SA kept my damaged motherboard. While I appreciate this discount, it’s not what I was looking for. I want the repair done entirely at Acer’s cost, as I purchased an Extended Warranty that (I believed) entitles me to this.

I’ve seen that other people are having major hassles with Acer support, so I weighed in as well, and made my impressions of Acer public, on my blog. 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.

Please can you organise for 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 got a reply!

Dave Malherbe from Acer South Africa called me, and after a chain of “returning your call” voicemails, we spoke yesterday. He told me that my request has gone up the chain of command at Acer HQ in Europe, all they way to the President (or at least his PA), and he’d been authorised to give me a discount on my repair.

He could drop the cost from over R6 000 down to around R4 400 (+VAT). Not much of a discount. For something that escalated so high, I wasn’t very impressed. I said that I’d rather get it repaired in UK (if you factor in courier costs, it’s still cheaper to send it there).

We then discussed my extended warranty, and he said I’d need to pry it out of Easy Computers (my supplier in UK who’d sent me the wrong laptop). So I fired off an e-mail to them. It’s gone backwards and forwards a few times, and they told me to contact Acer again. So I sent a very strong e-mail back to them:

We are sorry you are experiencing technical difficulties with your goods. All manufacturers have dedicated support lines staffed by trained personnel. We strongly recommend that you contact the appropriate manufacturer of your product:

I did that. Over a year ago, in fact. And they did nothing. Eventually, this week, they told me to contact you guys, as you didn’t supply me with the extended warranty pack that I paid you for.

If this is going to be a problem, please speak to my Acer contact who I’ve been dealing with: David Malherbe +27 11 233 XXXX. He knows all about my case, and if you mention my name, he should know who I am. He says that you guys need to supply me, you say they need to supply me, please can your sort it out between yourselves.

SR

We’ll see…

I spoke to Dave again, this morning, and he offered me an even bigger discount. If I didn’t want my motherboard back, he could discount it to R1 999 + labour (R250) and VAT. That’s starting to sound reasonable. I still think I should get it for free, but I’m almost prepared to pay that kind of price, just to save myself further hassle…