Acer Support – Not too shabby!

Had to contact Acer support today.  Had a new desktop that would boot sometimes and other times not.  Fans turned on, lights turned on but oddly no bios screen and nothing was booting (even listening to drive proved that nothing was initiating).  This would happen 2 to 5 times and then it would boot miraculously.  Very interesting.

So I won’t bore you with all the details (yes, I tried resetting the bios) but it was ultimately decided to exchange the unit as something was indeed wrong (and my curious side really wanted to know what).

So what did I learn?  That Acer’s Online Chat support was quick (less than 2 minutes to initiate) and polite.  I’d rate it a 7 or 8.

Now they didn’t actually resolve the issue.  In fact they tried really hard to reset the computer to factory image (cause the script tells them to) but they didn’t push the issue when I conveyed that no bios screen was showing up so it wasn’t a Windows issue.  They immediately opened a repair case # for me and took the relevant information.  The whole process was probably 20 minutes in total.

The other thing I learned, and would recommend to Acer management, is that they should really post their BIOS for download onto their website.  Maybe it wouldn’t resolve my problem but it was worth a try if I wanted to and perhaps save them a repair (or 2).  Not only were there no BIOS updates but not even the original BIOS was available.  Very odd and out of the norm.

I’ve always liked Acer equipment (value-end laptops & monitors mostly) and even with this glitch they are still okay in my books.

Lastly, I did find it odd that a Taiwan technology company has motherboards stamped “Made in China” (but thats a business decision).  Turns out they started moving factories there in 2000.  Interesting eh?