Acer sucks

September 4th, 2007

Acer, the PC manufacturer that made my laptop, officially suck.

A short while ago, my 6 month old laptop blue-screened out of the blue. It would then refuse to even switch on most of the time - totally screwed.

Some panic-striken switching on and off managed to get it to boot up, but it wouldn’t stay on for long before the dreaded blue-screen reared its ugly head and the whole thing died.

I wasn’t so worried about the laptop (To be honest, I was secretly glad because I’ve never quite fell in love with the weird screen that you need to look dead on at in order to see), but I was worried about the videos I had on it of my son growing up - the first 2 years of his life.

My photos were backed up, and it had taken ages. Videos were next and I didn’t quite make it in time.

Fortunately I managed to boot it up long enough to save videos up to 2003 (But none from after Ben was born unfortunately).

So anyway, I phoned Acer and told them the problem. “Fine” they said, “we’ll send DHL round to collect it and get it fixed under warranty”

Cool.

“What about the data on the hard drive?” I asked.

“Any faults and we’ll replace it, sir”

“Well I have valuable data, I’d quite like to know I’m not going to lose it before I send my laptop away”

“We’re not liable for any loss of data I’m afraid”

“Hmm…”

So I popped off to PC world to get a hard-drive USB enclosure so that I could get the data off it. Of course the enclosure had the wrong type of IDE connector, so back it went and time was pressing on.

So anyway, my experience of being able to sometimes use the laptop had convinced me that the disk was not the problem, and I decided that it should be ok to send it back.

A week later (Yesterday) my laptop arrived.

Attached was a note that simply read

“Hard drive replaced. Re-installed from server. Tested ok”

At which point, I was thinking “AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

Immediately the phone was being dialled and Acer were on the line.

“Can I have my hard disk back? The broken one?”

“No. Sorry sir, but it will have been destroyed”

“Destroyed?”

“Yes, because it’s a warranty replacement the old drive becomes our property, and we have to destroy it”

“What?? Well can you check?”

“It was a week ago sir, it will definitely have been destroyed.”

“But there were 3 years worth of videos on that hard drive. There was the first 2 years of my son’s life. I could have tried to get the data from it if you’d have sent it back”.

“That would have cost £160 sir”

“?!…”

“We can recover the data, but it costs £160. Unfortunately you didn’t take that option”

“I wasn’t offered that option! You mean I’d have to pay you £160 to prevent you from destroying my data?”

“Yes sir, we need to destroy them immediately for data protection”

“YOU DIDN’T DO A VERY GOOD JOB OF PROTECTING IT, DID YOU??”

And that was that.

I feel like my data has been kidnapped and a £160 ransom demand was made. Except it wasn’t made, because the blackmailing ransomer forgot to make that phone call, so they dragged my hard drive into the woods and put a bullet through the back of its head anyway.

Is this legal?? It’s not like replacing a spark plug - I don’t care if the garage throws away my broken spark plugs because that doesn’t contain valuable data on it. And how can they say that it ‘belongs to them’.

I presume it’s because they’d be giving me a £160 hard drive replacement for a drive that they’d be destroying anyway, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I can imagine that somewhere in Acer HQ they had some big meeting where they decided the processes and procedures and decided that destroying the drive would make their customer’s happy.

As for data protection - it’s my data. Surely the best thing to do to protect it would be to send it back to its owner. Now I only have their word that it’s destroyed. For all I know one of their staff could have taken it home to scan for credit card numbers.

All those videos, needlessly destroyed. I feel absolutely sick.

All I can do now is write a letter of disgust demanding proof that it was destroyed.

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