Why does ACER has a negative reputation?

[wintermint]

I've been hearing that Acer makes crappy laptop but no one ever explained why. Anyone know why Acer been getting negative reps? I am planning to get an Acer but I need it to be a good investment.

 

[raza715]

Just because they tries to make best items specifications-wise in cheap prices. I didn't see anything wrong with Acer, you can go with it.

 

[rgs80074]

personally i stay away from anything acer, i can't comment on their laptops but i had a monitor that was bad or going bad.

their customer service sucks period. in fact i am not sure how drivers on my pc would effect the monitor when not connected to the pc per their instructions but they seem to think it does.

after way too much blame on everything under the sun except for their monitor, even suggesting the power coming into the house was not sufficient to handle the monitor.

i finally got authorization to ship it to their repair center, of course at my own expense. got the monitor back two weeks later with a hand written note stating they could not find anything wrong with the monitor. i guess taking 5 mins to get the monitor turned on to the point to being able to use is not a problem as far as they are concerned.

tried dealing with ti again and they wanted me to ship it in again again at my own cost, it was 12 bucks the first time around i wasn't about to spend the money again and waste my time.

also you have to keep replying to your inquire even if you get no response as they automatically close all tickets after 7 days.

so their stuff might be good but once you start having problems, good luck on getting it resolved.

i hope this helps in your decision, sorry i couldn't comment on the laptop itself.

if i was going to get a laptop i'd go with a toshiba, only because my sister has one thats four years old and its taken a beating that no laptop should have to take and still works.

 

[Guest]

I'd hesitate to say everything Acer is a problem -- I have a film scanner which was by far the cheapest model you could buy at the time and has endured a good ten years since.

I think alarm bells about the brand started ringing when a girl friend bought one of their laptops -- which looked shiny (if tasteless) when new but, within weeks, the metallic finish turned out to be silver paint and began to wear, exposing black plastic below. Shockingly poor choice of materials, obviously. Then I became aware of a rash of posts here about Acer laptops failing -- and indifferent after sales support.

The pace of complaints has slowed noticeably. Possibly Acer were victims of selling large quantities and had no worse a failure rate than rivals. Perhaps they have recruited more people to deal with returns and, thus, complaints here have tailed off.

 

[NoNameWill]

On anything LCD you might want to buy a extended warranty. I bought a 4520 from a friend for a song. 40 bucks all it needed was a new LCD screen. I bought a lcd for 90 dollars shipped on ebay.

 

[mylifeforaiur]

Hello

I own an Aspire 3023 wlmi and my girlfriend has an Aspire 2920z.

I've had mixed experiences with Acer. On the one hand their products are cheap and often have well balanced specifications. Also, the design of their products is really improving and sometimes they look better than pricier brands.

However, their stuff is not really meant to last. My Aspire 3023wlmi is about 5 years old now and it has the following flaws:
- the hinge has a design flaw. The backside of the monitor began to develop cracks after mere weeks, and now 5 years later the plastic on one of the hinges has completely broken away (over the aprt of the hing at the back of the monitor), the hinge is not turning properly and while everything is still in working order I expect this to break soonish. Which might make the laptop impossible to carry.
- the DVD player never worked properly. Data rate seems lower than it should, so that when watching dvds the audio is not coming through properly. Tried new drivers, everything, nothing helped. Didnt send it in because i knew it would take ages and i didnt really care.
- the plastic is cheap and under the left wrist, the paint is gone. The black spot doesn't look good.
- keyboard is crap
- touchpad used to get REALLY hot with the old hard drive. Changed the hard drive 2 years ago. A little bit better now, but it's still undercooled.

So all in all it was a nice laptop for the price (though the CPU was a very bad one even for 5 years ago), and i'm happy that it still works 5 years later; but as you can see it was not without flaws and I would not have bought this product if I had known its flaws.

As for the 2920Z, which is a more recent model, it makes it apparent to me that Acer have come a long way since and it's a really nice little notebook.
However, no things Acer ever are perfect, it seems, as the notebook sometimes freezes when playing sound (be it youtube or mp3 through media player), which is a rather odd behaviour. Annoying.
Also, it's recently begun to show some display errors like this one:




this is why Acer doesn't have a very good reputation.


ps: but as I said, it seems that with every new generation of products, they keep getting better, so I wouldn't write them off completely. The problem is that, especially with laptops, by the time sufficient feedback about how well a specific model ages is available, that model is going to be outdated.

 

[NoNameWill]

mylifeforaiur

How much ram is in the 2920z? If it's only a gig with Vista you might want to go into bios and set the video card to the lowest settings. The VC robs from ram so if it is set to the highest settings you would only have about 750mb then Vista is taking about half of that. That leave you with a ram equivalent of back in the stone age.
In my 4520-5458 I put a 2gb stick in and left one of the 512mb in the other slot to take care of the vid card. I also dropped Vista for Ubuntu.

A couple just last year sued Acer for a slow aspire 4520-5458 running Vista. :lol: Don't know if they won or not couldn't stop laughing.

 

[RyRyMcFry]

The only thing i know about ACER is that their motherboards tend to go. I am repairing an ACER m5640-b5401A because the motherboard went after 2 years. And now my sister dropped off her ACER aspire one because her keyboard and touch pad stopped working, which is pointing to another motherboard problem. She just got it on christmas and has also had wifi problems.

 

[Guest]

I bought an Acer laptop and a month later the hard-drive failed. A month later after repairs it failed again. The cooling fan broke along with the battery. I repaired the battery and installed a new cooling fan however the laptop began to hang. I performed a system restore which wiped my Operating system instead (using acer erecovery).That is why they have a bad rep

 

[jacobdrj]

When Nvidia provided the onboard graphics a few years ago for low to mid-range laptop, Acer took the brunt of the soldering defects. And they often refused to fix it in a timely fashion. Now, everyone was affected by that crap: Even Apple and Sony (and certainly HP) but because most people in the low budget range used Acers, they got the bulk of the blame.

I love my Acer netbook. solid as a rock. Cheap to repair/upgrade. But some of their larger models had plastickey flimsey construction that was prone to breaking solder joints.

It is part of the reason I am so excited about AMD APUs... This won't even be an issue, and should make the lifespan of laptops from any company that uses these devices MUCH better/longer.

 

[WaldoSchaeffer]

My first experience with Acer was awefull. I had a desktop computer that was probably a pentium 3. I would turn it on, it would boot up normally, and then after about five minutes lock up. From that point on I hated Acer. Only now I realize that it wasn't the machines fault, but a software related issue. I have an Acer Aspire 7551-7422 Laptop right now, and I love it. I've never had any issues with it, and it just plain works. Drivers aren't an issue when I reformat it, they don't make me install all these extra programs that are as good as useless just to get my display working.....it's amazing. I don't see what people are complaining about. Maybe they made a few products that where just plain bad, but I think the new computers are so much better than what they where making before. I'm Acer/eMachines/Gateway all the way now.

 

[Humberto Forcelledo]

In the old days I used to be VP of engineering for Magitronic and had a lot of dealings with ACER. The Taiwanese mentality is very different to ours. In their minds you sell cheap, if it doesn't work , you replace it they do not feel the client will be inconvenienced if they saved $100. This went for ACER, DTK, ASUS and Magitronic. No amount of reasoning saw them see it differently, that the westerners would rather pay the extra $100.00 . Acer didn't even burn in their product and their parts were junk. They did buy Magitronic proprietary auto burn in and I went to Taipei to set it up, but was never used. Funny enough ACER is actually owned by the Taiwan government. DTK had a multimillion assembly line set up by germans and was never used. The only company that saw a a tremendous increase in quality and techno advances was ASUS (which just started with motherboards) and took the lead in the Taiwanese , but they are still lacking in their QC although their designs are not original but bought from the west. It is culture more than anything else. All the parts from dell and Alienware although well designed their components are shit. ACER (perhaps because it is owned by the government) looks at sales and never at returns or tech support . You must be nuts to buy ACER because you're doing it on price.

 

[Saga Lout]

It's time to close this old thread now. Anyone with a beef against a specific company should start a new one with some substantial and definitive evidence. Tom's has to be as careful as any other publisher as to the content of posts and this one can only go downhill.