I am now wondering whether Acer is losing the Race in the laptop market ? When I bought the laptop around 2 and a half years back, I liked it, because of the features I get for the price and in fact that was impressive.
I paid **Rs. 64000 **for the **TravelMate 4152 NLCi** with 3 year warranty and an upgrade of the default RAM of 256 MB to 768MB.
Was that a worst decision ? I don’t want to believe yes, but you decide after reading the review..
*Within 3 months**, my lappy stopped working. When taken to the customer care centre, they said it’s **mother board complaint**. My lappy started working again in a week. I was **impressed** by their service.
Another month, now it’s **turn of Harddisk**. Bad sectors and it had to be replaced. Luckily I had the backup and no data was lost. Again the **HD was replaced in a week’s time**. **Excellent service.
*I started recommending Acer to a few of my friends and told them that you must go for Acer just because of the service you will get. You should take 3 years step warranty though.
A total of 9 months have been passed and mother board stopped working again. Network card was not being detected by OS (neither by Windows nor by Linux). So yet another **Mother board replacement**. It took just 4 days to get it functioning normally.
On the 13th month of purchase, my **LCD monitor** showed some large vertical lines across the screen and it was replaced too. It took another week to get it **replaced.*
*For the last one year, no complaints!!!!** And I was quite happy and two of my friends bought Acer laptops against Lenova brand just on my recommendation. And I must say they are okay with the decision.
A few weeks back it’s the turn for **Harddisk again. It took 2 weeks to get it replaced. **2 weeks, but I thought it’s just an exception.
Now it’s my **motherboard** again. Machine gets switched off as if a ghost turned it off by pressing the power off button. I am a GNU/Linux user and when called on the support, it was fun. They were really hesitant to register a support call. After a few minutes of talk, they asked to open "Start --> Run". When I said, I am using Linux, they registered the call and gave the **complaint number as 040708-216.*
It’s been around 3 weeks, since I registered the call. You all know how cumbersome it is to see all your hours of work go haywire, just because it goes off power all on a sudden. You go offline in the midst of a serious business talk with a client and you are in serious risk of losing the business. No businesses lost, but they often wonder what happened.** I am really sad to see that my favorite laptop brand Acer going bad in services recently **:-(
When asked the support about how long it will take, they said, another week. It’s not their mistake. Acer should send in the new board or a repaired one to them and then only they can replace it for me.
For a summary, in the three years, for my acer laptop I had...
*
3 mother board replacements
2 hard disk replacements &
1 LCD replacement.**
Anyways it’s time for another laptop. I would have went for Ferrari model, if the service didn’t go this bad. I liked Acer because even in those early days most of its components are easily Linux compatible, including Wireless and Bluetooth. So in your opinion, should I go for Acer Ferrari again ? or look for some other brand ?