Mika Tuupola

What can make you more angry than no-use commercial technical support of software and / or hardware vendors? Recently one UPS of ours failed internal test. Batteries need to be replaced. Since there are a few different kind of batteries I went to American Power Conversion Corp company website to search for info. What they do have is a nice battery upgrade selector. Of course the pulldown menus did not have my exact UPS model listed. Also searching by model number did not work at all.

I next tried to contact technical support by submitting my question to APC Customer Solutions team using the form provided. I clearly explained that the selector tool in their website did not recignize my UPS and provided them with my model name and number so they could provide me with the info. The answer:

Thank you for contacting APC’s email support on 05/31/2004 09:24 PM. I would be glad to assist you.

You could contact any of the service center given below in this link we can have the batteries replaced,we dont sell in India as kit.

http://apc.com/support/contact/

Just what I needed. A link to non-working website. As a sidenote their toll-free 0800 number does not answer nor have I yet been able to reach anyone from APC Finland. Being the paranoid me I have already figured out the reason. They don’t want you to buy replacement parts to your failing UPS. They want to sell you a new UPS.

UPDATE: the people in APC Finland were kind enough to route my question to proper people and I got my answer in just couple of hours.