Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
I've purchased a few ASUS mainboards over the years, but my experience with them of late has made me swear off them for five years at least. For the next five years, at minimum, I will not purchase or recommend any ASUS product, and will actively warn anyone who asks against buying from them.
The problems started with a mainboard. Its BIOS has an edge case where a particular PCIe x1 card (and just that one card) isn't seen by the BIOS when placed into a PCIe x1 slot. The board sees it just fine in a PCIe x16 slot. A different type of PCIe x1 card put into the x1 slot works. The card works just fine when put into another mainboard's PCIe x1 slot. To date I've RMA'd the board once (returned with code NTF, which I presume means "No Trouble Found), and follow-ups with their technical support department only resulted in a suggestion I RMA the board again.
My conclusion: their technical support department can handle ordinary issues that any competent computer tech can handle on his own, but they're useless when it comes handling anything more difficult.
Then there was the update that totally bricked my Asus NT-R12 router. On Friday, while checking out something else, I connected to the router's web service and was informed there was an updated firmware available. I applied it, but when I restarted the router I was greeted with a very generic web page with nothing but an upload option. I thought that was actually kind of neat: it appeared the update hadn't applied properly, but the firmware thoughtfully provided a fallback to allow a re-try.
With the router out of commission, I had to connect my computer directly to the cable modem, which is a very scary thought for someone familiar with the risks associated with connecting a computer directly to the internet without a firewall of some sort in between. I searched the Asus web site for the latest RT-N12 firmware, downloaded it, and unpacked the zip file. That gave me a 4 MB file with a .trx extension, which I uploaded to the router using the fallback service. It accepted the file and recommended I do a restart ... and that was the last thing that router ever did. After the restart it was completely and utterly dead.
Maybe I should have contacted technical support after the failed update presented me with the "fallback" service. But given my previous experience with Asus technical support, I'm not at all certain they could have given me any useful advice.
After this fiasco, I went to the Asus Canadian support page to at least try to get someone to take note of their bad support. First thing I noticed was the gawd-awful huge stock photo of a shiny happy lady wearing a headset typing on her laptop. Guys: THIS IS A TECH SITE! I do not want to have to look at that idiot picture when I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem! (As a general rule I hate stock photos of shiny happy people. I view them as incredibly fake junk that adds nothing to the site and even lies about the company and its products.) I used Firefox's "Inspect Element" feature to delete the picture so I wouldn't have to look at it.
I selected the option for "Networking," then "Transfer to agent." There I selected Problem Type "Feedback." I entered my name. I then entered my email address. I also had to enter a telephone number. Finally I typed in a carefully worded description of the problem. When I clicked "Start Chat" I got:
Why in blue hell did they wait until AFTER I had entered in the information to tell me that?
Now even more upset, I went back to their main technical support page, scrolled down to the bottom, and from there clicked on "Contact Us" under the "Need Help?" footer. From there I selected "Customer Product Support," and ended up at the exact same page that didn't work for me in the first place.
That makes their boast of "The best online service experience" on their support page a complete lie and an utter joke.
Oh, what about a "Contact Us" page for general information? Such a thing does not exist on the Asus web site.
My conclusion: Asus is simply not interested in hearing directly from their customers. That tells me they don't care about their customers.
Further notes:
When I related the mainboard support story to a friend, he suggested I write someone at the company giving details of the experience. The problem: you really have to dig through their web site to find any names at all. By going to their Investor Relations pages, i found with the names of their top executives (under Corporate Governance - Management Team.) But unless I want to send airmail to Taiwan, there's no apparent way to let Asus know just how poorly I think of them.
There is no way using standard channels to let Asus know just how terribly bad their tech support is.
Maybe I should join Twitter and tweet this entire rant to them at 240 characters at a time. Maybe someone might take notice.
The problems started with a mainboard. Its BIOS has an edge case where a particular PCIe x1 card (and just that one card) isn't seen by the BIOS when placed into a PCIe x1 slot. The board sees it just fine in a PCIe x16 slot. A different type of PCIe x1 card put into the x1 slot works. The card works just fine when put into another mainboard's PCIe x1 slot. To date I've RMA'd the board once (returned with code NTF, which I presume means "No Trouble Found), and follow-ups with their technical support department only resulted in a suggestion I RMA the board again.
My conclusion: their technical support department can handle ordinary issues that any competent computer tech can handle on his own, but they're useless when it comes handling anything more difficult.
Then there was the update that totally bricked my Asus NT-R12 router. On Friday, while checking out something else, I connected to the router's web service and was informed there was an updated firmware available. I applied it, but when I restarted the router I was greeted with a very generic web page with nothing but an upload option. I thought that was actually kind of neat: it appeared the update hadn't applied properly, but the firmware thoughtfully provided a fallback to allow a re-try.
With the router out of commission, I had to connect my computer directly to the cable modem, which is a very scary thought for someone familiar with the risks associated with connecting a computer directly to the internet without a firewall of some sort in between. I searched the Asus web site for the latest RT-N12 firmware, downloaded it, and unpacked the zip file. That gave me a 4 MB file with a .trx extension, which I uploaded to the router using the fallback service. It accepted the file and recommended I do a restart ... and that was the last thing that router ever did. After the restart it was completely and utterly dead.
Maybe I should have contacted technical support after the failed update presented me with the "fallback" service. But given my previous experience with Asus technical support, I'm not at all certain they could have given me any useful advice.
After this fiasco, I went to the Asus Canadian support page to at least try to get someone to take note of their bad support. First thing I noticed was the gawd-awful huge stock photo of a shiny happy lady wearing a headset typing on her laptop. Guys: THIS IS A TECH SITE! I do not want to have to look at that idiot picture when I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem! (As a general rule I hate stock photos of shiny happy people. I view them as incredibly fake junk that adds nothing to the site and even lies about the company and its products.) I used Firefox's "Inspect Element" feature to delete the picture so I wouldn't have to look at it.
I selected the option for "Networking," then "Transfer to agent." There I selected Problem Type "Feedback." I entered my name. I then entered my email address. I also had to enter a telephone number. Finally I typed in a carefully worded description of the problem. When I clicked "Start Chat" I got:
Asus Online Customer Service said:
Why in blue hell did they wait until AFTER I had entered in the information to tell me that?
Now even more upset, I went back to their main technical support page, scrolled down to the bottom, and from there clicked on "Contact Us" under the "Need Help?" footer. From there I selected "Customer Product Support," and ended up at the exact same page that didn't work for me in the first place.
That makes their boast of "The best online service experience" on their support page a complete lie and an utter joke.
Oh, what about a "Contact Us" page for general information? Such a thing does not exist on the Asus web site.
My conclusion: Asus is simply not interested in hearing directly from their customers. That tells me they don't care about their customers.
Further notes:
When I related the mainboard support story to a friend, he suggested I write someone at the company giving details of the experience. The problem: you really have to dig through their web site to find any names at all. By going to their Investor Relations pages, i found with the names of their top executives (under Corporate Governance - Management Team.) But unless I want to send airmail to Taiwan, there's no apparent way to let Asus know just how poorly I think of them.
There is no way using standard channels to let Asus know just how terribly bad their tech support is.
Maybe I should join Twitter and tweet this entire rant to them at 240 characters at a time. Maybe someone might take notice.
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