Gripes:
Acers are good low-end-to-mid-level PCs.
Tech Ping please? :-)
I bought my Acer because of the price. Besides, most components seem to come from China anyway.
One important point - Acer’s tech support department isn’t in India.
Acer is a good choice if:
1) You know your way around fdisk, qpart, etc
2) You have built your own before
3) You can do you own tech support
4) You can load and unload OSes at will
5) You want to pay the lowest possible price for reasonably good hardware
Just my opinion
I am typing on an Acer Aspire netbook now, $350 at Costco. It does email and surfing and keeps my DH and me from fighting over the computer. Also it travels really well due to the size.
Obama voters buy Acer?
It's doggone good, I'm only using it to play movies from the NAS and off of Netflix so it doesn't see any heavy duty use but price/performance has been so good that I'm going for their AH340-UA230N home server to replace the first gen NAS box that I'm not real fond of.
No way could I build something in those form factors for those prices.
Anyhting BUT HP. I dont have a problem with Dell because I have friends who speak Flip and they can sweet talk the tech people. My HP laptop has got to be the worse bar-none.
HP’s CS line is India, but the 1st tier is Canada, but they have an attitude problem as well.
FAT32 partition may be a utility partition which includes restore options??? Some laptops are configured that way.
I understand what you mean about fluffware. I spend a good bit of time removing it on busienss level laptops, which makes me nuts.
For some reason the PC assembly manufacturing industry has been historically one of meteoric rises and falls. More so than most industries than I can think of.
I've followed that course with every PC I've owned.
I have been happy with Dell over the past 10-12 years. My only complaint is that the final prices are not as low as you initially expect. The quality has been good.
The best quality PC I ever owned was an IBM PS2. It had a 10” color monitor, upgraded to 250K RAM and a 40M (supersized) hard disk. The 286 CPU was a little slow, with 1-2 wait cycles.
The 1988 street price for that model was $4500. I got a 50% discount buying it through my university. It ran Word for DOS and very little else. However, it just would not die, and no one would take it as a donation. Finally, I had to take it out of the basement and apply my 10 lb. sledge hammer.
This has always blown my mind. Why in the hell do they do this? Every ACER I've ever worked on, which have been many, I've always converted the filesystem to NTFS before doing anything else. At one point I was working on so many ACERS that people at work were bringing to me, I thought about calling myself an official ACER repair tech. lol
Two anecdotes?
My wife’s Compaq died at a convention- with all her stuff she needed on it! Rushed to Wallyworld, got an Aspire, she set it up while I pulled the Compaq HD and hooked it to a USB universal drive adaptor- day saved, and she loves the damned thing better than the two previous laptops.
Checking back at Wally? They can’t keep the things in stock.
Anymore comments about Acer laptops?
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.