Why I won’t buy Averatec again
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Twitter itA little less than two years ago, I purchased a laptop from Averatec, a 6240 series. It was for my parents. A couple of weeks into using it, I discovered that I couldn’t connect it to a TV or to an external monitor, even though it had both an S-Video out port and a VGA port and its manual clearly said I should be able to do it. The laptop was pretty much brand new. Other than installing Office and a few other applications, I’d made no changes to it. So I called Averatec’s tech support, and after being hassled about having messed something up on the laptop (I’m an IT professional — I know my way around computers), I was told I should reformat, then call them back.
I could tell immediately that two things were wrong. One, the way I got treated wasn’t right, and two, when you tell someone to reformat, it’s usually a last resort, not a first step to fixing the problem. But since my parents didn’t have a vital need to connect the laptop to the TV or to an external monitor at the time, and I didn’t have the time to bother too much with it, I dropped the issue.
Fast forward by about a year. It turned out my parents really needed to connect it to an external monitor — actually, to a projector. I couldn’t help them. I called Averatec again, hoping to get someone nicer on the phone, only to be told that my warranty had expired and I’d need to pay for a support incident. Given the level of service I’d gotten before, I said no thanks, I won’t pay the $100 (cost quoted to me) and ship my laptop to them. I dropped the issue, and had my parents work around the problem by putting their presentation on a CD and using another computer.
Finally, last September, they’d had enough “fun” with the laptop. It had started to crash due to some virus infections, they’d lost precious data, and they didn’t want to use it anymore. (They wanted to look at buying a MacBook.) I told them to let me have the Averatec. I needed an extra machine to do development and testing work. This time, I also had some spare time on my hands and wanted to troubleshoot the external monitor issue. Since the laptop was definitely due for a reformat, I did just that. You know how much fun it is to reformat and re-install everything, so I’ll skip over the gory details. Suffice it to say that when it came time to download updated drivers for the laptop, the ones listed on the Averatec website were the same ones that my laptop shipped with. In other words, they were 1 1/2 years old. But given the level of support I’d gotten from Averatec before, this didn’t come as a surprise.
I started looking around, and I found the Unofficial Averatec Support Forums. It was there that I identified the exact video card used in my laptop. I then located the SiS site (they were the manufacturer of the graphics chip), and downloaded some updated video drivers. I tried them all, but none of them worked when I connected an external monitor to the laptop. Judging by the posts on the Averatec forums mentioned above, I wasn’t alone. This was a known issue, all along. Averatec owners had experienced this problem from day one. Apparently, Averatec had denied it was a problem from day one, until numerous complaints forced them to acknowledge this as an issue. But what did they do? They blamed it on SiS and left it there. Instead of working with SiS to fix the problem, they didn’t bother anymore. (I gathered all this info from various posts in the forums.) Again, that was just typical of their approach. They gave bad support from the start, they didn’t update the laptop drivers on their site, and they didn’t try to fix the issue by pressing SiS to issue a working driver. They left the customers out in the cold.
All of this could have been prevented from the start if they had only paid a few dollars more to get a decent video card in the laptop. After all, this was marketed as a multimedia machine. It should have had a better video card than some cheap chip soldered onto the motherboard. But again, this was typical of their approach. You only have to put two and two together to see they’re only out to sell their products and don’t care about the customer. They could care less if their products malfunction. They’ll even sweep stuff under the rug if needed, like they did with the video card issue.
The last straw was this: I emailed Averatec, asking if they knew of any updated drivers for my laptop. I didn’t ask for tech support in fixing the problem, and I made that clear in the email. All I asked for was a link to a website that had an updated driver. I told them I was aware of the issues with the video card, and that I hoped they knew of a working driver by now. I got a curt reply right back, telling me my warranty had expired and I was on my own. I needed no more proof to convince me of their pathetic customer service.
I decided to resign myself to knowing the laptop would never work with an external monitor, projector or TV. I was left with a very bitter taste for Averatec as well. No matter what they say about their current or future products, I’m going to avoid them like the plague, because I know what they’re really like as a company. I’ll stick with other brands, like HP, Asus or Lenovo. (I can’t stand Dell’s laptop design.)
Just now, I did another search on the Averatec forums, and it looks like SiS came out with an updated video driver on their own about a month ago, and people are saying it’ll work with an external monitor, sort of… I’ll have to give it a try. But still, this doesn’t change my opinion about Averatec. From the looks of it, they had nothing to do with the video driver updates. Plus, they had my email address, and they had the email addresses of the other 6240 series laptop owners. The right thing to do would have been to email us, apologize for the problem, and announce the driver update themselves. Did they do any of this? Absolutely not. Final verdict: I won’t buy from Averatec again.
While I’m on this subject, I mentioned this same problem briefly in a post I wrote last year, called “When it comes to home computers, K.I.S.S. and forget it“. You might want to have a look at it, because I gave some pretty sound advice about computers at home, in particular if you or the people you’re helping aren’t tech geeks.
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I’m with you there. Had to ship back my Averatec 4155 EH1 laptop during the first month because of power problems. Took 3 weeks to get it back! No laptop for 3 weeks! The customer service was not helpful either. Now, I hate this laptop so much that I want to throw it out of the window. Battery lasts just 30 minutes! Is this a laptop or a desktop? This machine is so poorly designed and the quality so bad that I had to upgrade the RAM from 512 to 1 GB to have a moderate performance. It also heats up unbearably, I think I can make toated bread by putting it near the fan exhaust. All I can do now is wait for Mac leopard to be release so I can get me one. Nice but sad to know that we are not alone in this Averatec “plague”.
Comment — February 27, 2007 @ 8:19 am
Same here, Averatec customer support is exactly like a comedy routine you laugh about on TV, and hope you never experience this type of extremely rude, and unept support.
I guess Averatec is a French word for “We don’t care”!
Comment — March 8, 2007 @ 11:30 pm
Averatec is a joke. Mine was bad out of the box. Two RMA’s and 3 months after purchase it was working as well as it ever would. Never had all components working at the same time.
Repair center is careless and breaks on thing while fixing another.
No more Averatec for me either.
susan
Comment — May 12, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
How about the fact that mine gets so hot that I had to take the back panel off just so the cool pack I have will help cool it down some. Or the fact that this is the worst laptop if you are a gamer. My husband and I are gamers and we just baught more ram for my laptop and my games still lag really band and parts of my game won’t even load. I asked Acclaim for help not knowing that it was my computer, and they had me do a scan and send the results to them. So I did and their reply is, I don’t have a video card at all. Is there really that much of a difference between a video card and a video chip? Apparently.
Anyhow, I will never buy another Averatec item again and I have already spread the news to my students that they would be better off with a Gateway than an averatec and I don’t rightly like gateway’s either. So I see Averatec loosing alot of business they way that are going. I am not sending any their way.
Comment — November 17, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
[...] sure, but your repairs are covered. What do you worry about? Well, I worry because my crappy little Averatec laptop, which I can’t stand, and is built with cheap parts that don’t perform as advertised, [...]
Pingback — December 27, 2007 @ 9:05 pm
Hey…so did you ever get the s-video out working? Averatec forums are dead I guess, the link doesn’t work.
I’ve had this AV5500 laptop for years but I finally decided to use the s-video out to watch some Netflix streaming content.
The dang thing doesn’t work. I’ve tried the 3.63a and the 3.83 SIS UVGA3 drivers without any luck. If you could point me towards a solution that would be great.
Thanks!
matt underscore riggs at comcast dot net
Comment — March 11, 2008 @ 11:58 pm
Matt, sorry, but the S-video is pretty much unusable on the Averatec. I went to the SiS website and downloaded the latest drivers for the SiS chip in my 6240, and then I was able to get the VGA port working — but only halfway.
The computer just isn’t able to do dual displays, period. It can display to either the Averatec, or to an external monitor, and only at certain, limited resolutions.
And you can’t just plug in the VGA cable and expect the laptop to see the external monitor. No, that would have been the norm with other laptops, but not with Averatec. No, you have to plug in the cable and do a restart, then try to guess where the display will happen. It could happen on the laptop, or it could happen on the external display. It’s a toss-up.
There’s some tweaking to the resolution and colors that can be done through the control panel after you’ve managed to get the laptop to recognize the external display, but let me tell you, this laptop’s video capabilities are truly scraping the bottom of the technological dung heap. It really sucks, and I’m surprised there wasn’t a class action suit against Averatec for all the claims they made in their product brochure, nonetheless, about the 6240’s capabilities…
Comment — March 12, 2008 @ 10:30 am
Update - I went to the Averatec website and battled their system to download the original drivers on the laptop. The drivers were all mislabeled, you would select one and it would take you to the wrong page. But eventually I installed the driver and got S-video out working. The only problem now is the laptop screen maxes out at 800×600 and looks like crap.
Comment — March 16, 2008 @ 6:30 pm
AVERATEC SUCKS! DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE PIECES OF CRAP!
The touchpad paint wears off within 60 days and support calls it “normal use - not our fault”.
Less than 180 days monitor won’t power on.
Attitude of tech support sucks.
Wrote President of the company a letter to complain. Fails to respond. Perhaps he too knows the product sucks and there’s just nothing he can say to support it.
DO NOT BUY THIS CRAP. SAVE YOUR MONEY!
Comment — March 18, 2008 @ 12:32 am
[...] which have the CD/DVD slot in the front. The placement of my audio line out/line in ports on my Averatec Windows laptop meant that it blocked those ports with the right support lip, as you can see [...]
Pingback — April 24, 2008 @ 8:02 am