Posted on 06/30/2009 12:49:58 PM PDT by TChris
Also, two other things I forgot to mention - I love the keyboard on the Acer, with the slight curve to it (think natural keyboard but not as extreme), and the keys feel nice.
The touchpad is also nice. My work computer is a Dell laptop, and I can never get over how terrible the keyboard/touchpad are.
I wiped my HD before even starting the original OS. I have XP on it.
It has been very good for me.
I work in tech and have many windows, mac and linux laptops and desktops. I don't need high end graphics for what I do, so I usually buy as cheap as possible. The Acer fits the bill for me.
I got an email from circuit city yesterday. They have a 15" Acer refurb with 3GB mem, 160 GB HD and vista home for $299. The only thing I didn't like is that it had an AMD processor rather than intel.
I was thinking of getting it for my son. I buy mostly refurbs/returns, say from from Dell outlet, if I can, so being a refurb doesn't bother me. A lot of times the big box stores send back units they haven't sold and Dell, etc., can't sell them as new.
How did it happen?
Easy, Acer has been on a buying spree for the last four years or so.
They’ve bought numerous European PC VAR’s, and couple of Taiwan ODM/OEM’s (such as E-Ten), and a few Manufacturers that we all know, such as Gateway (which had just bought E-Machines and most of Packard Bell), and PB Holdings (owners of the rest of Packard Bell and other small name/niche producers). And some peripheral device manufacturers, as well.
Prior to all of this, Acer was a fairly high quality product. Nut, now, most of their stuff is bottom to mid range, at best.
That said, my Brother just bought an Acer Aspire TUba, 17”, with all the cheap bells and whistles laptop. I “helped him out” by installing Win7 as a dual boot. Everything worked well, except their display driver was crap. Luckily, nVidia had it on their website for download.
I just shook my head a decade ago when a friend bought five Acer computers for his business. Since then, I’ve purchased twenty-five Dells and sworn by them. I recently bought an Acer Aspire One netbook and absolutely love it. I find myself using it very frequently (its got XP on it) and for $239 I’m not exactly paranoid about dropping/breaking/losing it. I’m going to buy one for each of my family members.
I haven't seen any change in their quality level, personally.
A buying spree is fine by me. Dell has made some strategic purchases along the way themselves. (I believe they own Alienware, for example.)
I agree that they are low-to-mid machines, and for many people that's just fine.
I’ve had two of their earlier laptops. The one I remember, and still have, is an Acer Note Lite. Great and durable little machine, too. Finally gave up the ghost after having been dropped one too many times on the power connector.
The MoBo wouldn’t take another soldering. LOL Now, it sits on the “good old memory” shelf, along with some of my other old favs, like my Dauphin with a MS PenOS, and my quad processor HP 486DX4-100.
I have zero issues with with any range of machine, low-mid-high, or whatever. They all have their place and a price point. :)
BTW Dell Inspiron 1720 w/3GB RAM Oversize Bat., and a Core 2 Duo for 629 last time round...
Thanks very much for giving Acer laptops a review. We were also happy with a Dell refurb laptop. Turns out the precvious buyer had never used it though he may have turned the power on
Most definitely. My desktops are all from there.
stuff. If I buy another laptop, which I don’t see happening in the near future because I still love my Acer, it’ll more than likely be another Acer. It was even easy to upgrade (I updated the processor, memory, and HDD to the latest I could) and it runs Vista/Ubuntu perfectly........
Was all that upgrading easy to access from the bottom by undoing a few screws? Did you have to unsolder the CPU to upgrade? THANKS!
It was very simple and there was no need to solder anything. In order to upgrade the CPU, all you have to do is unscrew the bottom plate, and then unscrew the full heatsink/fan apparatus. The CPU should come out fairly easily. Note that the latest CPU the Travelmate 8204 would take is the T7600 (which is still several years old, but is a Core 2 Duo and is newer than the Core Duo I had in there). There are two kinds of T7600s - the SL9SD and the SL9SJ. The D means it’s the socket variety (the kind you want) and the J is the kind that’s soldered directly on the board (which you don’t want). Some of the ones being sold as SL9SDs on Ebay are actually SL9SJs with an adapter on the bottom that adds the pins and effectively makes them SL9SDs, but I was wary of those and made sure to buy the original socket variety.
The RAM is in the same compartment as the CPU and is easy to get to.
The HDD is in a seperate compartment that is easy to open, just make sure you screw the carriage off the old drive and put it on the new drive, it helps disperse heat.
I had an HP notebook for about a year. I liked to use it on my bed, with the power cord plugged into the wall outlet next to it. Of course, I would occasionally snag the cord with my foot as I walked by, pulling the laptop onto the floor. It survived these falls OK, but the power cord socket was on the MB.
Eventually, it broke off, and there was no way to fix it other than replacing the MB which was absurdly expensive. I couldn't even run it off the battery because no stand-alone battery charger existed, you had to charge it with the power cord.
I don't know if all laptops are designed like that, but it seemed like very poor engineering to me.
> I’m with you on HP- NEVER AGAIN
The drive bays broke and I cannot reach my CD-ROM drive, the ‘cage’ that enclosed the disk drives is welded in place, there is no way to remove them.
The slots in the back to install hardware boards open up on NO SLOT!!!!
The tech support is horrendous and their software is a pain in the butt and crashes my system more than anything else<
I even wrote the president of HP, with of course, no replies. 1 week after my 2 year full-coverage warranty expired, I crashed the pc forums with every short-answer horror story about HP you could think of. It was guerrilla warfare on the world wide web. If I convinced one person NEVER to buy HP, it’s worth it.
Try this: 4 times I sent my laptop for repair to their Memphis repair place within a span of 10 months. NOw everytime someone asks me for advice, I tell them HP is the worst laptop ever...
Many thanks. The trend is towards making laptop’s vital parts more accessible. I see this on my own modest Compaq I got two years ago. I can get at the HDD and memory very easily. I’m going to look at hard it is to get to the CPU even though I have no plans to upgrade it. Its CPU is something like T2310 Dual Core Intel
I recantly loaded Fedora 10 on a friend's AA1. It was sweet!
What exactly is Windows setup media? Are you talking about a Windows install disk?
Yes.
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