billsey said:

It doesn't matter which retailer you use, as long as they aren't selling you a refurbished or demo unit. The retailer will likely offer an extended warranty, which may or may not be the one sold by Acer. If theirs is not from Acer you can purchase the extended warranty directly from Acer after the initial purchase from the retailer (@Acer-Manny, please correct me if I'm wrong there). You can register your product with Acer no matter who the retailer is.

Thanks, Billsey. That’s all I really wanted to know.

The query only came up because I’d seen a Trustpilot review from a customer who’d bought an Apple PC from Box, then Apple wouldn’t accept his purchase date as the automatic Apple Care warranty start date and said he was out of warranty-buying time, which I thought unfair. The buyer reported that Apple said their warranty started when Box took delivery of that product, and not the customer’s purchase date.

I just wanted to check that that wasn’t the case with Box and Acer, but I’ve spent the best part of 10 days+/ 2 weeks trying to drag the answer out of Acer. They seem impossible to contact, the given phone number seems to be in a different time zone because when it eventually gets answered - I rang at 10.25am on a Monday morning - I got an automated message saying I’d rung out of their opening hours, which were 9am-5am Monday to Friday. I’m in the UK and using the Acer UK site, so frustrating doesn’t cover it.

Thank you for your answer. It agrees with what Box told me, purchase date is on invoice, supply copy invoice to Acer, extended warranty can then be bought. The first year’s warranty comes from Box, but presumably you can always just go straight to one of Acer’s extended packages instead.

I know from reading the info on the Acer site that you have 365 days from purchase to buy one of their extended warranties, which is a lot more time than Apple give you to buy Apple Care - from memory, that had to be bought within 3 weeks (or possibly less) of purchase. 

I’ve now had two incomplete responses from Acer, in poor grammar, and they closed the ticket off and despite the email saying - click here if you have further questions, the link takes me to the closed ticket. Again, frustrating! Another email said their phone lines were down, but gave no indication as to when they might be operational again.

And there I was, thinking Acer had won all sorts of awards for great customer service! Has all this just been a glitch, an aberration, or is this the way it always is? 

Thanks again, Billsey 😊 

@billsey Oh trust me, the UK is freaking out over Corona too! I know that Acer in the UK won Best Customer Service recently, but I’m still wavering over making my purchase because Acer UK seem almost impossible to contact and what scant answers I’ve had to emails have been in broken English. I’m alternating between **** it, I’ll just get it, and Oh....I don’t know. 

I settled on the Swift 3 because it’s the cheapest backlit keyboard with decent SSD storage I can find over here, and even then I’m going to have to spend more on a bigger external drive, plus an optical drive (loads of stuff on CDs and DVDs, including my laser printer drivers), plus the Next Business Day On Site warranty, so it’s already going to run at over £700. 

The customer service number for the UK doesn’t seem to be working. It either doesn’t answer, or it answers during the stated working hours and says they’re closed. 

I totally agree with you about the CS seeming to differ from country to country, and that it could be a contracting thing or a culture issue. I know from this forum (which seems extremely sparse in user numbers) a buyer in India is having massive problems in securing an extended warranty, even though he has emails from them confirming there’s no problem with Acer providing him with one. Go figure. 

What computer have you got, and what went wrong with it? Man, new laptops seem to last for about a tenth of the time they used to! 

That’s an impressive collection! I meant what went wrong with the computer you had to have fixed