WORST CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Murali333

I WOULD SUGGEST DONT EVER BUY ACER LAPTOPS. YOU HAVE THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE IN ACER. think about everything before buying a laptop. A laptop packed with loads of high end features doesn't mean that it's the one. I have bought a laptop from acer. The cost of the laptop is 85 k INR. The mother board had issues they asked me 60 k for repairing it and the worst part is the price of the laptop is 70 k now. Their WORST AUTHORISED SERVICE CENTER WILL  LOOT your MONEY. 

I am giving a fair opinion. Go for dell or hp which has a excellent hardware and customer support. If you are ok with high budget go for mac also. Don't go for these acer laptops.

This is not just my opinion, google and compare hp dell and these guys . Compare hardware quality, customer support and other specs. Don't fall for eye-catching plastics.

No long term value
Bad customer support
Bad hardware .

This is me who asked this question in 2017 and now I am blaming myself for choosing acer..............

THIS IS A FAIR REVIEW FROM A LONG TERM USER.......

aphanic

While I don't know the full details of your case, for example whether the laptop was within the warranty period or not, I'd like to give my unbiased opinion on the matter at hand.

Aftersales support varies from region to region, I believe that to be true regardless of the brand, because essentially you're dealing with people and each place has different customs, different ways of doing things and that can't be made equal for all corners of the world. Even within the same country things could be different depending on the agent you talk to.

You mentioned various other brands and the only one I have experience with over here (Spain) is Dell, and it is as well mixed feelings, 10 years ago for example, when they still had an in-house aftersales support team things looked alright. Nowadays customer service is subcontracted to another company which is not even located in Spain, you have no physical address where to send a letter to for example.

Besides, for those with premium warranty plans repairs are done by subcontracted companies as well, they don't send a Dell technician to your house or where you're located, they employ technicians (probably trained) from different companies so you can already see the kind of variability you can expect. If you live in Barcelona for example, they're not going to dispatch a tech from Madrid, they'd use a local company over there.

All this comes to say that we can't generalize, it's not always black or white, it's not that Acer has bad customer support and the others have good ones; it really depends on many things.

On top of that, online, you're rarely (if at all) going to see success stories; people that go to online forums or communities such as this one do it because they're running into problems, or to vent about the bad experience they've had with tech support. To say a brand X has bad support based on the reports you see online is unfair (to me at least) because you're only seeing half of the picture, you're missing the cases in which everything goes smooth.

Say someone buys something, after a while it happens to develop or show a fault so they contact tech support, it gets diagnosed correctly, the product is fixed in a timely manner and all is good; that person is unlikely to go tell their story on a forum.

In my opinion, every single brand will have products that show faults, just because of how semiconductors are made, there's no way around it; but I do reckon some have better QA teams than others.

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The thing about your laptop now costing less, it surprises me that you find that odd because that's how it has always been with technology. In fact, as soon as you buy it, it already costs less because it is not brand new.

But as things get old and newer ones are available (and mass produced) the old ones cost less, it isn't probably as noticeable in the Apple world, but it happens just the same. When they announce a new iPhone for example, they keep selling the old one at a reduced price. That's just how things work. And the second hand market reflects it as well, specially for companies that produce several new models on a short period of time, even if they're pretty capable machines they lose value rather quickly.

They're still perfectly good machines, they're just less appealing to some people because a new option is available. Others on the other hand prefer to buy things second hand, because for the same money a new mid-tier model costs they can get what was a top-tier model the year before. Sure they're forgoing the warranty and all, but what the hell, bang for buck it could be a good decision.

At the same time, things wear with time, batteries are a great example of it. The are designed to last for a certain number of charge and discharge cycles, and they aren't keen on heat for example, nor being fully drained; that too depreciate products.

Murali333

I get it. Things wear out in time. 
I will give you the details.
My laptop model is acer aspire vx 15
The cost of the laptop when I bought is 84 k INR
the laptop is 3 years old so obviously the warranty expired.
I approached a acer service centre suggest by the company itself. 
They told me that the mother board has to be changed. 
I said fine and asked them the repairing cost note. The next day I received a call saying it will cost me around 60 k INR to change. 😶😶😶. I was not able to believe that the rest of the things that a 128 GB SSD, 1 TB harddrive, 8 GB ddrd4 RAM a backlight keyborad, a 1080 display , a gaming kind of bezzels and other other few more parts of I missed anything is just 10 k away from the price of the motherboard 😆😆. I laughed and told him instead of reapiring I can buy a new one. 

My questions are.
1) is the acer service centre which I approached is trustable.
2) does the board alone costs 60 k INR where the laptop price is 70k.
3) Is acer laptops are like use and throw material.. instead of repairing you can buy a new one kind of items. So for sure any one would question about the reliability of the product.


I get you point. When things goes well people wont post. Only when there is a problem people will post or ask questions. But for a good company every negative feedback counts. If acer beleives it is better than all the products it has to be answerable to all the customer pain.


I know the warranty has expired and I have to pay for the repairing work. But is it fair what the said about the repairing cost. I want a fair explanation for that

aphanic

I see, it does seem like a high cost for a repair, but I think it's not too far from what would be fair.

Let me explain, roughly speaking because I don't even work for Acer haha, but let's say we're counting just the cost of components as if they were new:
 - 1080p panel, 50€
 - 1TB hard drive, 50€
 - 128 GB SSD, harder to estimate but let's say 30€ for an M.2 SATA one
 - 8 GB DDR4, 35€

I wouldn't know for a backlit keyboard because that's a custom part, but those 4 components would amount to 165€ which is more or less 14.6k INR for us, consumers, brands get to pay less for the things and we'd had to add the cost of the keyboard, and prices vary wildly at different times of the year depending on availability.

So if a new unit costs now 70k, minus those 14.6k, let's say 15k, it puts the motherboard (+ enclosure, keyboard and projected costs for warranty) at 55k already.

The problem with the repair that had to be done to your motherboard is also that there are expensive components soldered onto it, so not only you have to pay for the motherboard itself, but also the processor and graphics card if there was a dedicated one. That increases the price, same for boards that have RAM soldered in, those 35€ would have to be included in the price of the repair if the RAM was on-board.

To the cost of the components, we have to add labor, and that alone sometimes costs as much as the components themselves. Maybe for Acer the motherboard itself justs costs 30k INR, but labor amounts for the rest. If you were a business and actually went on with the repair I'm sure everything would be disclosed in the invoice, how much the parts costed and how much you had to pay for the labor.

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But it is as you say sadly, the current trend in consumer electronics is use until it breaks, then replace by something new instead of trying to repair it. While I'm all in for the opposite haha, try to repair the thing, look for the fault.

If you have a grill to cook food or a smoker and it stops working at some point, maybe it's just the thermal fuse that blew up; source the part from a reputable place (it costs next to nothing) and replace it, done, you just saved yourself having to buy a brand new smoker.

In electronics things are more complex because they're smaller and tightly integrated, the problem in your motherboard for example, it may be easy to spot, if there's a component that blew up or is malfunctioning and replacing it may be easy-ish (if you have access to the schematics that is, I'm not sure technicians do), but it may as well be not trivial at all to find the problem itself; or maybe their policy is just to replace the motherboard and be done that way.

That's what Apple does when there's a fault, and why it's important to get the darn Apple Care if you buy one of their products, because even if the fault is minimal and perfectly fixable (there's a channel on YouTube focusing on Apple repairs, actual repairs, the guy is Louis Rossmann) they will just tell you they have to replace X and that if that's the motherboard you might as well buy a new machine. They tend to solder everything to it on laptops.

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You'd probably be surprised to know that not all of the processors (just to name a component, happens to many others that involve semiconductors) that are manufactured are usable either! There are some that after testing and inspection have to be discarded because they don't work as expected, or have to be repurposed and binned for different purposes. It's unknown how many, but generally the number is greater when foundries switch to new manufacturing nodes.

The quality assurance chain goes up too so the final system designers and assemblers (Acer, Dell, HP, etc.) have to rely on the QA done by the respective brands for each component, for example, the problem in your motherboard could actually be due to a manufacturing problem that Intel had in that processor, who knows. There are contracts in place and reliability assurances up to a point, I don't know, all of this stuff is done under NDAs so even if I knew I wouldn't probably be able to talk about it.

But sadly, more often than not QA is sacrificed for better profit margins, and the words "perfect" switch to "acceptable within expected margins" and at worse "good enough". We'll never know, there are so many companies involved in the making of a single laptop (and variations too) that it's a nightmare.

Even in the same sub-model! If you were to buy the same computer you did, at the same place, but some months later it may not have the same components! I mean, sure, it would have a 1080p panel, but maybe manufactured by a different company, same with the RAM, hard drive, SSD, down to the individual chips soldered onto the motherboard.

It varies at the time of assembly depending on the availability they have (or whatever comes cheaper at the time). It may sound crazy, you'd think the components would always be the same, but nope.

rich1974

in this case, a much better option is ti go for someone witch disassemble such a laptop and sell it for spare parts. buying a new mobo it is not worth it.   

Commodore_1995#

I agree with what colleague @aphanic said in his first response. Now, you didn't say what the problem is. You just said that the main board is defective. What would be the defect? Does the motherboard just not start? Why if this is the problem, although it is not the question in this topic, take a look at these buttons as well:

I know that the repair center said that the main board should be replaced. But if it were my notebook, I would check the buttons above!

Murali333

@egydiocoelho how would I know which button 😅. Acer service centre said motherboard is defective shor circuit or something might have happened. won't work need to replace. Need to replace this was the statement from acer service center.

Commodore_1995#

It's just an idea. There may be some other problem with the motherboard that you may be causing. Now, if the laptop were mine, I would put some layers of electrical tape over buttons 1 and 2, because when these buttons are not being pressed correctly, they prevent the motherboard from starting:

Murali333

Will give a try

Commodore_1995#

OK! The buttons must be pressed. Then, post the result here.

Commodore_1995#

@Murali333 Did the above procedure help you?

ABHI1999

My NITRO 5 keyboard damaged like 4 times. Warranty is now expired .When I had the warranty I had to replace it 3 times. So the spare parts are very bad they are supplying. I wrote a mail to the customer service but no use. Service center is asking 9k to change. Within a year half of the time the laptop is in service.

User1213

I also had a horrible experience with support. I waited 2 HOURS for support and I tried to ask if I can use a tablet as a wireless monitor on my computer. They said "Since your device is out of warranty, there will be a charge to assist you"  I told them its a simple question and shouldn't need to pay for you to answer it. They didnt respond and I left.

Callistemon

Acer should be ashamed of having such horrible customer service. Technical support is very incompetent, repairs take several weeks or months and are often unsuccessful, and they are so stingy that you need to cover shipping charges. In one case, a customer visiting the US bought a stingy laptop from a store without a return policy, and it needed to be repaired. Acer told them to leave it in the US instead of taking it with them, and then once it was done being repaired, then Acer blamed the customer for having not taken the defective laptop with them before having it repaired. That was all because of extreme stinginess over the $100 international shipping charge. The online Acer Store has a stingy 15-day return policy. Warranties are only a pathetic 1-year and some of the models that did have 2-year warranties were downgraded to 1-year in 2019. After the 1-year warranty has ended, which it is always about to, then Acer redirects you to AnswersBy, which is even more egregious and charges $70 in order to fail to answer basic questions. In addition, AnswersBy often continues charging the credit cards for months, long after failing to answer simple questions, and always has crappy pop-ups for a 10% "deal of the day" that is actually the exact same every single day. If Acer's bottom of the barrel customer service is not atrocious enough, they should at least be ashamed of redirecting customers to AnswersBy.