German users hit a wall as Acer and ASUS disable support portals after HEVC ruling
It’s one thing to pause laptop sales in Germany, but cutting off support completely is a new level of strange decision-making.
German customers are running into a new problem tied to the ongoing patent dispute between Nokia and both Acer and ASUS . This week, users in Germany reported that the vendors’ German websites are effectively unreachable, which also takes driver, BIOS, and firmware download pages with them. The block appears to rely on geo-IP checks, so language settings in the browser do not help.
What makes it messier is how far the blocking goes. According to ComputerBase, some German users get redirected to an error page even when they try to use non-German regional pages, including attempts to reach US domains from Germany. That means existing customers can lose the simplest path to official downloads, even if they already own the hardware and just need an update.
ASUS has publicly said its after-sales services in Germany remain operational and that existing customers should continue to receive support while it evaluates legal options. The practical issue is that “support” and “access to downloads” are not the same thing, and many users are currently failing at step one, reaching the right support page in the first place. Munich I Regional Court is referenced in ASUS’s statement as the source of the temporary injunction.
Source: Acer.de & ASUS.de
How to get to downloads
ComputerBase’s workaround guide focuses on getting to regional sites that are not being redirected. One approach is to use ASUS’s China domain or search with “China” added so results land on the CN support pages, then use browser translation. For Acer, ComputerBase points to the Taiwanese site as reachable from German networks, again with translation doing most of the work.
There is also a more vendor-specific workaround for some ASUS desktop users. ComputerBase says ASUS DriverHub was able to download motherboard drivers on a system where ASUS.de was blocked, but it is not meant for notebooks or NUC-class systems. ComputerBase also notes the blocking does not appear to catch every connection, but for many customers the German sites have remained inaccessible for about a week.
Users in legal crossfire
I can’t think of any big brand ever turning off a whole website, which demonstrates how badly these pages were made (can’t they just turn off parts of it?). If a court ruling says they cannot advertise or provide support for certain products, why are the entire sites down?
This patent dispute does not affect graphics cards, monitors, or peripherals, so are users unable to access that content too? It looks like ASUS chose a nuclear approach and turned the whole domain off for now. There is also no clear timeline for when it will be back, which leaves thousands of users in Germany without easy access to drivers.
This is also a good reminder to download and archive full laptop driver packages once in a while, just in case.
Source: ComputeBase
