Acer Travelmate laptop : Read before you buy

If you're thinking of buying an Acer Travelmate laptop, especially one like the Acer TravelMate 4501 which I bought, then I advise you to read about my experience of Acer and it's so called "customer service" before you buy. I'm a Director of Private Healthcare UK. We're a  business which relies on technology; and when the supplier lets you down......

 

These are the details and the correspondence related to Episode 2 of my Acer Travelmate laptop experience. You should also read the Introduction to my Acer laptop experience where there are links to other episodes (yes there's more!).

 

This Acer laptop (a TravelMate 4501) is less than a year old. In Episode 1, it went AWOL for three months, and when it came back  I abandoned it to a dusty cupboard and bought a brand new Dell Latitude Dell 610 which has been trouble free, reliable and performs magnificently. Since Acer wouldn't offer any compensation apart from a 3 month extension of the warranty, my small company was £1,200 out of pocket.

 

A couple of months passed by, and we took on a new member of staff......

 

He needs a laptop........ "Let's get that Acer out of the dusty cupboard."

 

OK....it was a foolish thing to do.

 

But we did it. And of course, the new guy needed a monitor for his desk, a widescreen monitor to match the widescreen on the laptop.

 

....so I took the risk and bought an Acer AL1916 widescreen monitor because there would no problems with compatibility, and it was cheap!

 

OK....that was a VERY foolish thing to do, you think.

 

 

You're right. How stupid could I have been. The Acer AL1916 widescreen monitor arrives. We take it out of the box, plug it in and.....it works! But only as an extension of the laptop screen (what this means is that instead of the external monitor being a replica/mirror of the laptop screen, the Acer AL1916 widescreen monitor would only work as an extension of the screen area.) Nice one.

 

We try everything we can to change the laptop's display/multiple monitors setting to get the external widescreen monitor to work with the laptop. But we fail.

 

So, it's back on the phone to Acer Support. Now, if you ever need to call Acer Support, make sure you book yourself a few hours (or days) free in your diary.

 

So, I say, something like, "OK, so I have a 12 mth old Acer Travelmate laptop with a widescreen and a brand new Acer AL1916 widescreen monitor, and they won't work together."

He says. "That's right".

I say, "So, what do I do?"

He says, "Send the monitor back".

 

I hang up. This call has taken another hour of my time. I then call the supplier of the monitor - Misco, and ask for a refund or a replacement monitor.  And what do they say?

" Sorry, mate, not our problem. It's Acer's problem".

 

And that was it. The monitor went onto Ebay and I sold it at a loss of £40.

 

BUT..........there's more to come.

 

 

Read Episode 3 - The UK Acer laptop fails again.