Saturday afternoon we were out shopping around for computers. Betsy wanted a light, portable computer that she could write on, check e-mail. Her dream would be the Surface Pro 3, but that was in a price range of $1K or more to get what she wanted. We could replace her main notebook computer twice with that much money.
So she knew she didn’t want a Surface Pro that bad. She has been borrowing out daughter’s Acer Chromebook during the days to go out and write, so her fallback was a Chromebook. So that’s what we went shopping for.
We started at Walmart, and found the Acer Chromebook for $199. Then we went to Best Buy. We found three different Chrome books. Almost the minute we started looking at them we had an associate (or whatever they call their employees ) come over to talk to us and answer our questions. We had four different associates come check on us in less than half an hour that we were looking. We wavered back and forth between the Acer at $179 at Best Buy, and the $249 Samsung, but finally chose the Acer (we already had one Acer, and the money was cheaper. At the register I learned that the price was actually $199, with a $20 discount. So Wal-Mart and Best Buy had the same price, but Best Buy was giving the best buy). So we bought it and brought it home.
Almost immediately we had problems. The moment Betsy opened up the new Acer, the internet connections of all the computers in the house went inoperative, and the Acer itself didn’t connect very well. Couldn’t really do much. We spent 24 hours. Everytime she opened the lid, the rest of the system shut down. So we took it back for an exchange Sunday afternoon.
The customer service desk was helpful. They brought over a person from the Geek Squad who asked us questions and we explained what happened. He basically said that couldn’t happen. The only way would be if the computer somehow worked on a frequency that blocked our wi-fi router, but that such a thing was impossible. Nevertheless, the customer service desk person was very willing to let us exchange our Acer for another similar Acer.
Only problem was they couldn’t find one. Inventory system said there were three in the store, but they couldn’t find any. The store was going through a lot of reshuffling for sales related to the upcoming tax-free weekend, and apparently there were momentarily misplaced. After about half an hour they found one, rang up an exchange, and we were on our way home with a new machine.
Which did exactly the same thing. So Betsy took that one back, and picked up the Samsung, which worked perfectly. No problems with the exchange.
Our best assumption now is that the two Acers themselves might have conflicted with each other.
And we rated the Best Buy Customer service as very good, the best we have had. Strange things always seem to happen to us, but they handled what we had well, and found a way to get us satisfied. And get us working.
At The Rainbow 