Hi everybody.
I don't like to bash so I shall just try to explain what happend and hope you'll have some good advice on how to handle it.
I bought a Acer Aspire 3003LCi laptop from Circuit City at the start of last semester. I'm in college and we do most of our home work in science and math classes online using coursecompass.
It's a pain, I don't like having to do it oneline, I don't like having to pay for a subscription to the website in addition to paying tuition and the book and supplies, but thats the way the world works now so thats what you have to do. It's really a good website, very helpful and all but I'm the type who prints things off to read them and what not, just really hate working on the internet, I'd rather do my homework from the book and turn in paper copies but technology marches on and right over my outdated self. (:
Anyhow, I don't know much about computers but I didn't just run out and buy the cheapest one I could find. I shopped around and finally decided this one delivered the most bang for the buck so to say (mind you this was about 8 months ago). It has a 15" XGA TFT LCD, Mobile AMD Sempron processor 3000,60GB HDD, 512MB DDR, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, wireless lan.
Sure its not a gamers computer but I'm not a gamer and about all I needed it for/use it for is Word, Powerpoint, and Internet. Thats it, no games or anything. Maybe an occational DVD or CD will be played on it but thats it.
So I bought it as well as the Circuit City Advantage Protection Plan.
I took it home and shortly after turning it on it froze up. I thought that was a bit odd, but I've never used a laptop before so I thought maybe the battery needed to be charged up fully since it was new or maybe it was just a glitch or maybe the room was too hot or something.
It turned out there was something wrong with the computer. It continued to freeze up randomly, hot room, freezing room, with the fan on, with the fan off, in Word, not in word, on the internet, not on the internet, with programs running, with no programs running. It would not write CD's in Word either.
So I called the number on the Circuit City advantage plan I had purchased. When I bought it I was told if anything ever went wrong all I had to do was call in and they would mail a box to my address, I was to drop the computer in the box and upon which it would be shipped back to them and they would have it back within two days.
I thought that was a jolly good service and was the main reason I bought the plan (a $100-$150ish plan by the way). However upon calling the number on the plan it asked me to enter the Serial number of the unit. I did so and then the machine said, sorry, your unit is still under the manufacturers warantee, and the Advantage plan does not cover anything until the manufactures warantee is out, and then the bloody little machine would hang up.
I called back again just to make sure I heard it right, which I did, and again it hung up on me. Surely there is a better way to do that, at least return them to a menu or something, but disconect?
I thought surely this can't be right, I have the protection plan, so up to Circuit City I go where a little lady in the customer service dept helped me. The computer would not take my computer saying that it was still under Acers warantee period, but she contacted Acer for me and said I needed to send it in to them to be serviced. That didn't help me much but the person was very helpful and nice.
So I called Acer. Acer said it's going to take about two weeks. I said I'm in the middle of a semester. I can't do that I have homework that's due, if I didn't I wouldn't have this stinkin computer (well I didn't say that exactly:).
So I decided to live with the problem for a while. It was annoying. It cost me many Comp Paper drafts and papers, as well as chemistry and math homework. I grew rather adapt at saving my work to a flash drive every few minutes or so, otherwise when it froze I'd lose everything I had been working for the past five minutes or so, anything saved to the hardrive in those past few minutes vanished.
But I soldiered on until the touchpad quit, I tried the system recovery CD's and the system crashed, and I was left looking at a blank screen, and I said, well, hmm, can't really do much work without the like this so I called acer up. They said, reboot it silly lad. I said I tried and its now totally inoperatable. The tech ran me through some checks, we tried to reboot it again, acess BIOS at the logo screen, etc, etc. It was dead as a thankgiving turkey.
So I packaged it up and sent it in to Acer. A couple weeks later I get it back. The keypad worked now, but it still froze.
The letter inclosed with it said it had been thoroughly tested and repaired and they had replaced the Key Board and Soft loaded the Unit.
I limped through the rest of the semester and meant to have it sorted out over the summer but never got around to it. Yeah, I know, that would have made a lot more sense than waiting til the fall semester started but it was a crazy busy summer and I had gotten used to not having a functioning computer.
So back up to Circuit City I go, I went back to the tech department and said, hey, I bought this plan on this computer, its still under Acer's warantee but can't you look at it and see if its anything simple that maybe I can just replace out of pocket or something, just so I can get it working right?
They said sure, since you bought the plan we wil check it out for free and see whats wrong with it and if we can't fix it we'll send it off to Acer. So I brought it in. They looked at it, couldn't find anything wrong. It froze solid several times while they were working on it, still couldn't find anything wrong with it though and finally one of the techs told me the AMD Sempron 3000 was simply a slow processor and that was just normal for the unit.
I said its normal for it to freeze up while I'm typeing a word doc? He said well you have to understand while you might just have Word open there are a lot of processes running that you can't see that can be taking up a lot of space. So basically the computer I bought only has enough power to run itself? (:
So I thanked him for explaining that to me (: and took my computer and left. I called Geek rescue and another indepentant computer repair facility and they both told me he was full of it and my AMD processor was not slow and running a word processor was not going to overload it and cause the computer to freeze. I already knew this but it was good to hear it from somebody who knew.
So I spent about 5 hours total on hold waiting to get throught to Acer. I finally glued my phone to my ear for a morning and after shaving, eating, dressing, and driving halfway to school I finally got through. Victoria answered and we set it up to have me send it in again to be repaired. She was very nice, polite, and understanding that I did not know the serial number as the laptop was in the trunk of the car that I was curently driving down the road. She looked up my record by name and phone though and we got it all sorted out.
I feel as if I'm being given the runaround by both Acer and Circuit City. They say the Advantage plan does't cover anything til the manufacturers Warantee is up, well they are both good for a year. Does this mean my Advantage plan doen't start until after Acer's warantee is out or does it mean that I bought a years worth of Advantage Plan that I did not need and never had a chance to use as they both end after a year?
I'm going to go ahead and send it into Acer again and hope they can get it fixed. I feel as if its a lemon, it has had issues since the first time I turned it on, literally it froze that first time I turned it on. To me that says something was faulty from the factory, I hadn't even hooked it up to the internet yet.
So if Acer fails to fix it again, what are my options, besides send it in again. Circuit city doesn't seem to be that interested in getting it sorted out. Acer is the devil to get ahold of. If it was something simple I could have fixed out of pocket I would, but at the same time I feel that Acer and certainly Circuit City after I bought the protection plan, should have at least showed some interest in getting the problem righted.
So that is my sordid tale. Any recommendations?
Sorry about the horrible spelling and errors, I haven't ever gotten Word reloaded after the last time I had to reboot so I have no acess to Spellcheck.
Cheers and Thanks!
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