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posted Apr-15-2003

STAY AWAY FROM A2Z!! Below is an edited version of a complaint I sent to them. Anyone considering buying something from these guys please read the whole post. I eventually received a refund for the defective board, but I can't imagine how long it would have taken if I couldn’t have gone there in person. Anyone who has had a good experience with A2Z, count your blessings!
I bought an Abit KD7 (w/o RAID), an Athlon XP2100+, and 256M of RAM. The MB had a lot of problems, and after about a month, it died completely. I sent an email on Feb 24 to their tech support They called back and advised me to bring in the board, CPU, RAM, and my video card to diagnose the problem. I brought everything in Tuesday Feb 25. I was told that someone would look at it that afternoon. Wednesday, still no news, so I called twice, leaving two messages, one in customer service and the other in tech support. I was unable to get through to a human. I also sent an email to tech support asking for a reply. On Thursday, I left another message but never received a reply, via voice or email.
I called Tuesday afternoon and finally reached someone in the RMA dept. At first, he was unable to find out anything about the board, and then put me on hold. He came back and told me that the board was bad, and that it had been sent to Abit for replacement. He said that they no longer carried the non-RAID board, only the board with RAID. He told me to call him back on Friday March 14. I thought that it seemed an inordinate amount of time, as they had already had the board for more than a week, but agreed. Out of curiosity, I checked their website after I got off the phone, and it showed the KD7 in stock...it still shows it as in stock!
On Thursday March 13th, I called back (taking several tries to get through) and once again he had trouble finding out any information. He said basically the same thing he told me the time before, and said he would call Abit and call me back at in twenty minutes. I never received a call back. At this point I had been ran around in circles long enough. I called first thing Friday morning, the day I was told the board should be there. It took four times to actually get through. He told me to call him next Friday, that the board would be in then. I said that was unacceptable, and he put me on hold to talk to his boss then told me that his boss would call Abit and ask them to overnight the board, and to call him Monday. At that point, I asked to be upgraded to the RAID board so I could get the computer back together. He put me on hold again, and came back and said that he couldn’t do that because the company would lose money. THEM lose money!? What about me?? I then asked that he just refund the money for the board. After going around and round on the phone, I said that I would be down at the store that morning, and we could settle it then. He put me on hold again, and came back that he would give me the RAID board, but I would have to bring back all of the manuals, drivers, etc that came with the board so that it could be resold it when it came in. Now on top of all of the other problems, I had to leave work to go home to get all of this stuff, and then take it down to Aurora. It has since occurred to me that all of that stuff would have been in the box with the new motherboard, so he must have known then that they didn’t even have the board (or at least didn’t intend to give it to me).
Here’s the part that really irritated me:
I showed up and was told that the warehouse guy was at lunch, and I would have to wait a few minutes. I had already wasted the whole day trying to resolve this, what was a few more minutes? 5-10 minutes later, he called me into the back room to tell me that “all of the Abit boards had been taken to a computer show”. He then showed me a “new” board that he could substitute for the Abit. It was a “new” Asus A7V266-E, and he said that was the best he could do. I pointed out that the VIA chip on the Abit board was the VIA KT400, not the 266 that was on this board, not to mention the difference in RAM speed, and the fact that this board didn’t have any on-board LAN, was not “new”, just in original packaging, and as I discovered later, didn’t have the back I/O plate included.
Furious, I just took my stuff (including the Asus board), and left. I stopped at another store on the way home and bought the Abit board that I wanted- the same board that would have taken A2Z more than three weeks to get. I got it in ten minutes
Here’s the kicker: When I asked where the show was they took ALL of the Abit boards to, thinking that I could go there and pick up a new board, he told me it was in Syracuse. I decided to go to the computer show in Berea the following day. Wouldn’t you know it, but A2Z was there, and they had the Abit board there that had “ALL been taken to Syracuse” I checked out the Syracuse story- that show was the weekend before. All of this seems like a lot effort on their part to save upgrading me to a board that probably cost them about $10 more.

What a bunch of scammers. Pass the word.

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