ASUS International Warranty
Our previous laptop broke about 1.5 years ago. It was a no-brand one with just one year warranty. When we were selecting the new one we wanted to have one with two years international warranty to make sure it would serve us for at least that time. After comparing various models and their warranty conditions we ended up trusting in ASUS.
The laptop had quite a good price-quality ratio as long as it was functioning. There were minor compatibility issues with sound card which never worked for simultaneous playback of midi's and recording the output to audio. Some drivers that came with the laptop were crappy and others crappier, but without using them it was pretty OK.
Go back to Thailand
A few weeks ago while travelling in France there was a problem with the keyboard.
Enter key functioned only every once in a while and required pressing hard. This proved to be pretty annoying when trying to write a book or chat with friends. After a quick research on the Internet we found quite many reports of similar problems in the model we have (A9RP). One review was praising the laptop but at the same time warning about weak keyboard.
Changing the keyboard is rather easy to do so we decided to go to a local computer
store selling ASUS. The person serving us told that the company would hardly do
any warranty exchange in France as the computer was bought in Thailand. He
told us cheerfully that one of his customers with a broken ASUS had to go back to
USA for the warranty fix. Then we were told to call to a service number. If we had called to that number they would have probably played us endlessly some expensive evergreens. When asking how much a new keyboard would cost, he told it's about 50 € which is more than the value of an old broken laptop.
After-sales scam
We decided to contact them and get the problem fixed. There was no warranty
service information on their web site excluding the phone number. Paying
for getting their faulty product fixed sounded stupid so we filled out their web
form. After a few days we got a reply explaining that keyboard is not included in the warranty. When we sent them a copy-paste of the International warranty rules where there is no such exclusions they didn't reply to us any more.
The next thing we'll have to do is to contact European Consumer Centre who solved our problem with Air Europa, and stop buying ASUS products in future. It's in a way pity because with proper warranty the laptop would have been worth of recommending it. Now we can only recommend to avoid ASUS as it does not appear to have international or actually any kind of warranty, at least outside Taiwan.
