In praise of Acer product support

Most people are quick to complain when something goes wrong with computer hardware, but far fewer go out of their way to congratulate vendors for a support and maintenance job well done.

So I thought I’d buck the trend by praising Acer for the efficiency of its collection, problem diagnosis and return policy, at least where the faulty unit is still under warranty.

All electronic and electrical devices go wrong occasionally, with a certain percentage dead out of the box, and just as many again likely to see one or more components fail within the first year. The one thing that differentiates suppliers is the speed and efficiency with which they deal with the problem when things go wrong.

I was pretty annoyed when my netbook started to hang when it got past the BIOS and start-up routine, using battery power or the electrical supply.

I called the repairs hotline and a representative talked me through a manual reset which had no effect, then booked the unit in for return and repair.

Some overly zealous instructions on exactly how the netbook should be packaged and addressed were issued, followed by a telephone number to ring DHL to arrange collection, and the netbook was picked up at 8:55am on Monday.

I didn’t think I’d see it again for at least a month, but on Tuesday lunchtime I received an email confirming that the unit had arrived at the repair depot and promising that engineers would look at it shortly.

Less than 24 hours later, I got another email saying the unit had been repaired and would be returned within three working days. The repaired netbook appeared at 10am on Friday, along with a new power brick.

That’s a pretty impressive five working day turnaround, though the apparent simplicity of the problem lent itself to a quick repair. One gripe was that all the data (not the OS or apps) had been wiped, something Acer warned me about. Question to Acer or anyone else: how do you back up the contents of a solid-state hard drive when you can’t even boot into the netbook to start with?

Another slight worry was, despite the warranty, a £68 charge would have applied if the fault originated from any software I had installed.

I should just say that I have no special relationship with Acer and I never identified myself as an IT journalist.

If anyone has had a good or bad experience with Acer support, send me your comments.