Monday, June 18, 2012

Acer Customer Service - Chapter 2

I shipped my Acer back to the Acer depot in Mississauga, Ontario.

I did not receive the email that they promised and as such I was not totally sure what the packaging requirements were and whether they would pick up the cost of shipping. As it is I am not holding my breath on the shipping costs.



As I had purchased the Acer in part as a spare battery and power supply I did not include that in my shipment. In any case it made the package lighter and therefore cheaper. Acer would have batteries and power supplies as do I. All I want is a new HDD and they can re-image it for me.

I still maintain that a hard drive should not have failed as soon as it did. I am not sure if I can blame Acer for this as the drive is a Western Digital, the same model as I have used on other devices. It is not as if the computer had particularly abused, it had been used in exactly the same manner as the other Acers that I have in my possession. I am further presuming that the drive could have been from a "bad batch".

The third chapter of this saga will be how long Acer take to return the computer to me and what they actually do to it. As I was saying before there was no data on the computer so I don't care if they re-format it. They would have to do that anyway as it requires a new drive. I might as well have a computer that is in warranty until April 2013.

As a side note I did check the warranty on the drive itself with WD. The serial number was recognized but it was obviously recognized as one that had been installed in an OEM installation and I am not sure if it would have been registered as being installed in Canada - it is anyone's guess where that registration was. If and when the drive is replaced (in Canada this time) it will be interesting to see if it is in warranty in Canada. Unlike the AO522 the drive and memory are particularly easy to access on the AO722.

I could have hand delivered the computer to the Acer Service depot in Mississauga but as I don't trust Acer to honour the repair and want to make sure that I have a record of its delivery back to them I decided to pay for tracked shipping. In any case the $26 was probably less that what I would have had to pay for the PSP from FutureShop. FS are all too keen to sell you these plans but it is almost impossible to find out how much the plans cost. Searching the Internet and looking on their website doesn't reveal a definitive answer. I think that it depends on the product and could be a percentage of the price paid. This will probably vary from item to item as more are likely to fail than others. Still, on a computer in the $350 range I would think that the PSP would have been at least $50 for the extra year.

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