First Viewpoint

Friday, May 18, 2007

The story of Acer's aweful costumer service

-------- Excerpt --------

Problem: An Acer Aspire notebook with Vista OS wakes automatically a few seconds after being put in sleep/hibernate modes

Solution:
  1. No device should be set to wake the system --> use the POWERCFG command
  2. Make sure the IPv6 option is disabled. (This is the main reason that it took me 2 weeks to figure it out)

-------- The full story --------

I am writing this to have a record solution for maybe another poor user with a similar problem. After 4 months of waiting with the slow procedure of Acer sending me the "free" Vista upgrade for my Acer notebook, I had the chance to install it on my brand new system last week.
Everything went well, except that the system wakes itself automatically after sleep/hibernate modes.
I tried everything, from using "powercfg –devicequery wake_armed" to getting a list of any device that might wake it up (and then disabling any one armed, "powercfg -devicedisablewake (device name from -devicequery)"), to disabling every possible device listed on the device manager one by one. I also played with all the possible parameters of the power management options: Vista's and Acer empowering ones. But the problem still existed.

So I decided to email the costumer service, because my suspicion was maybe the BIOS upgrade didn't go well and I wasn't sure what the latest version number is. After two very useless and longly separated email correspondences, they directed me to call them. When I called, they provided no assistance at all: after 10 minutes of questions, he said that this line is for hardware related problems and I should call their billable line ($3/m, hello ?!?).

It is ok for them not to be able to solve the problem or suggest anything, what I am pissed off about is their lack of mere attempt to help, and mere courage to say they don't know ... This is a brand new system being upgrade with the package they shipped. I am usually adamant to contact the costumer services, only as the very very very last resort. Too bad such a good product comes with such a bad costumer service.

Anyways, while rechecking everything I suspected that maybe there is some compatibility or setting problem with the Vista's newly added feature: IPv6 capability. And ... boom ... that was it. I disabled the IPv6 option and everything is fine now. I suspect that although in the BIOS and the network card's properties wake-on-LAN was disabled, IPv6 was messing emerying up.

Links:
  • Acer email support
  • Acer Europe (Better organization of downloadable stuff)
  • Note: in order to open a cmd with administrator previlages, you need to hold ctrl+shift and then click on cmd on the all program list , this is true even when logged with an administrator user account

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home