Acer Skoda - I mean Ferrari

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I have owned an Acer Ferrari now for approximately 13 months. Previously I had a problem with it freezing randomly. I spent some time trying to reproduce the problem and after a month or two was finally able to reproduce it 100% of the time. I sent my laptop back to Acer armed with exact steps and as a result my laptop was returned to me after only a couple of days.

For the past 2-3 months I have been seeing very rare, random resets. Obviously I blamed Windows, as you do :-) Some software I had to convert AVI to MPEG would always reset the laptop, but I just put that down to dodgy software. More recently I noticed that 7-zip would also reset my laptop *only* if I used ULTRA compression on a file larger than 500MB.

So I tried Winzip, same problem. I installed Vista and tried both Winzip and 7-zip in there, same problem. With steps to reproduce + proof that it was not the OS I felt I could finally send the laptop back for repair without running the risk of it coming back "No fault found".

The problem lies in my opening sentence "I have owned an Acer Ferrari now for approximately 13 months". The problem is that in my quest to find 100% reproducible steps my warranty has expired by about 30 days.

I explained all of this to the guy on the phone at Acer. "If only more customers were like you!" he said, and then continued to tell me that I had to pay for the repair. After talking over me for a few minutes I finally lost my temper and swore at him, something I have never done before.

So, now I am really annoyed! I have an old £400 Hewlett Packard laptop that has been working (slowly) without problems for years now, yet I pay thousands for a laptop with a quality brand such as "Ferrari" and it breaks twice in 13 months! I'd expect the quality to be better, wouldn't you?

What *really* annoys me though is that Acer didn't send me a card telling me my warranty was nearly up and asking if I would like to extend it (which I would have done), and ofcourse I had no idea it was coming to an end because the receipt is.......surprise surprise it is with my accountant who is preparing last year's accounts!

Ferrari I am disappointed. You have put your name to a machine that has the body of an F1 and the inner workings of a cheap old banger!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ferrari is itself a victim... Don't ever try to buy anything from Acer again, personally I would classified products of Acer are CRAP! For cheap notebooks I would choose Dell instead.
9 May 2007 at 10:15
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