My Experience with Acer Products Quality & Services

When our company score to be part of Acer dealers, I was rather having mixed reaction based from my experience supporting these products especially their laptop lines have a lot of hardware issues including long warranty time frames. After a year run, it was freaking headache and create more unnecessary extra work.

It's true that Acer products are affordable to buy that packs with good stuffs and some newer technology compared to other products. I actually own one of the laptop from a great deal that comes with fast performance with less than $1K even slap with three years warranty. During those years of warranty cover, only one time mine were sent for warranty. The rest of the record so far are minor issues sold in year 2011 that our customers experiencing. This actually shows how much the products has improved compared to past. But that did not really last long.

Bad Hardware's Out from Factory

This is the nightmare I am worry about selling Acer products. Starting from last year, I see the increase numbers of new shipment packs with different faulty hardware's issues. In my record list, the motherboard is the highest return rate that came out from the seal box. I am not impressed by it because both my work and delivery were badly affected even the warranty return hardware also faulty.

Acer seriously need to look into this.

Manual Inspection Required

Aside from bad hardware out from factory, loose assemble hardware part came to our attention during inspections. While its doesn't often happen, I never ignore during inspection as I discover loose CPU and WIFI at my end. Sometimes seeing graphic card blow in front of me.

For your information, I have never seen Acer has its own built in diagnostic software until these days for us to test the hardware automatically for both consumers and businesses. They never implement even in the server lines. It makes our work uneasy and harder to trace the problem.

*As much I know so far, Acer did indeed have their own diagnostic tools. But available only to its own repair center.

Do It Yourself

Every new arrival Acer products require to install extra power supply unit, memory ram, hard disk drive and graphic cards manually. While it is a good thing given opportunity maintain your learning and no restriction opening the side cover destroying the warranty seal. It was just unnecessary time consuming configuring and setup.

Registering Warranty Are Pain in the Ass

When it comes to unnecessary work, Acer Extended Warranty registration are the fucking worst wasting my precious time. I got to admit I never done or had any experience doing online registration at first because the Acer agent never give us any training or instructions even not knowing the warranty registration time frame were only given two months limit. If its over, we have to print out a form and includes little paperwork to proof that the customers purchase the product over two months period. This whole thing look like we were somehow forced to sell the Acer products within two months.

It's kind of fuck up situation I have to go through to learn everything myself and slowly build up the full records for every computers. Oh, did I forget to mention, I have to hand written down the serial numbers manually into the AEW card and pull out the stickers to stick into each damn computers.

The next steps, I have to register one by one into Acer Malaysia website. This god damn procedures actually eat up my entire day sitting in front of the PC just to do the registration and even had to make sure I print out the confirmation screen in PDF or print screen to proof that I have success register.

The first year was begun pain in the ass because the server kept crashing and had to contact the help desk to verify my registration. There are such cases the warranty date in their system were not even updated at all. I remember myself going through the list of 60-70 computers to check every single warranty error date and found almost half of it has to make report to Acer Malaysia for correction. It was really frustrations moment at that time

Am I doing paper work for Acer now? Definitely yes and I believe there were other or faster way to do this kind of silly registrations. But I never got brief so I have to continue stick with this sort of method.

Self Deliver Back to Miri for Warranty

The disadvantages buying Acer is the lack of on-site support. This is why companies in Brunei prefer Dell no matter there are huge price and hardware specifications different. You cannot promote Acer and never was a good choice for company unless has big budgeting issue. Why? Simple, we have to sent down to Miri for warranty and yet you don't get the parts on the spot. You need to wait at least for weeks to receive replacements deliver from the center.

Even when the replacement parts arrived, we have to run inspection and testing because recently I received few return warranty hardware’s that are faulty. This is certainly unbelievable how bad the Acer QC facility handle the parts nowadays. How can you support businesses like that?

No More Acer

No matter how impressive the price they could offer, I had enough with the problems facing above. I may still work on supporting and doing admin job registering the products. My advice to you all, go for Dell to make your purchase life easier.

If you read the news on January 2014, Acer report huge loss in PC industry and working on turn around strategy last year. This affects the whole Acer marketing in the world. When my management told me about how Acer in Miri will be planning to provide us extra replacement parts for easier to warranty. Up until now, I have not seen any single move. Basically they just talk cock in the end. No more Acer.