Apr 24, 2008 11:43 AM
3511 Views
(Updated Apr 24, 2008 12:54 PM)
I am now wondering whether Acer is losing the Race in the laptop market ? When I bought the laptop around 2 and a half years back, I liked it, because of the features I get for the price and in fact that was impressive.
I paid Rs. 64000 for theTravelMate 4152 NLCi with 3 year warranty and an upgrade of the default RAM of 256 MB to 768MB.
Was that a worst decision ? I don't want to believe yes, but you decide after reading the review..
Within 3 months, my lappy stopped working. When taken to the customer care centre, they said it's mother board complaint. My lappy started working again in a week. I was impressed by their service.
Another month, now it's turn of Harddisk. Bad sectors and it had to be replaced. Luckily I had the backup and no data was lost. Again the HD was replaced in a week's time. **Excellent service.
*I started recommending Acer to a few of my friends and told them that you must go for Acer just because of the service you will get. You should take 3 years step warranty though.
A total of 9 months have been passed and mother board stopped working again. Network card was not being detected by OS (neither by Windows nor by Linux). So yet another Mother board replacement. It took just 4 days to get it functioning normally.
On the 13th month of purchase, my LCD monitor showed some large vertical lines across the screen and it was replaced too. It took another week to get it replaced.
For the last one year, no complaints!!!! And I was quite happy and two of my friends bought Acer laptops against Lenova brand just on my recommendation. And I must say they are okay with the decision.
A few weeks back it's the turn for Harddisk again. It took 2 weeks to get it replaced.2 weeks, but I thought it's just an exception.
Now it's my motherboard again. Machine gets switched off as if a ghost turned it off by pressing the power off button. I am a GNU/Linux user and when called on the support, it was fun. They were really hesitant to register a support call. After a few minutes of talk, they asked to open "Start --> Run". When I said, I am using Linux, they registered the call and gave the complaint number as 040708-216.
It's been around 3 weeks, since I registered the call. You all know how cumbersome it is to see all your hours of work go haywire, just because it goes off power all on a sudden. You go offline in the midst of a serious business talk with a client and you are in serious risk of losing the business. No businesses lost, but they often wonder what happened. I am really sad to see that my favorite laptop brand Acer going bad in services recently:-(
When asked the support about how long it will take, they said, another week. It's not their mistake. Acer should send in the new board or a repaired one to them and then only they can replace it for me.
For a summary, in the three years, for my acer laptop I had...
3 mother board replacements
2 hard disk replacements &
1 LCD replacement.
Anyways it's time for another laptop. I would have went for Ferrari model, if the service didn't go this bad. I liked Acer because even in those early days most of its components are easily Linux compatible, including Wireless and Bluetooth. So in your opinion, should I go for Acer Ferrari again ? or look for some other brand ?
