Posted on 06/30/2009 12:49:58 PM PDT by TChris
This year, Acer appears poised to overtake Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent into one of America’s favorite dorm-to-empire business stories. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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.
Pakistan....Afghanistan....Kurdistan? Where is it?
Obama voters buy Acer?
I agree.
May I add an OR to your list?
-OR- You don't have terribly high expectations for your computer anyway. (The performance deficit of a factory-configured Acer wouldn't bug you.)
Canada, I believe.
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.
The restore partition was FAT32 as well, but the main Windows partition came from the factory as FAT32.
Bizarre.
It's easy enough to fix, but how many average users will pop up the command prompt and type "C:\>convert c: /fs:ntfs"?
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.
Yeah. A guy can't build a box for what he can buy one these days. ...at least until you get up there in the price spectrum a bit.
Same here. (My employers for the past 15 years or so have all been 98% Dell shops.)
With only a few oopses along the way (The first black Optiplex cases, the GX260s with the bad electrolytic capacitors, a handfull of bad Maxtor and Seagate HDDs...) I have to say that I've been quite pleased with the Dells I work with.
Oh, and DELL INCLUDES A WINDOWS SETUP DISC WITH THEIR MACHINES!! I wish the others would learn.
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
That’s a VERY good assessment!! lol
Tech support in India?
We own a Dell, a Toshiba, and a Gateway. I’ve called tech-support on all of them at one time or another and ALL of them are in India. They may all actually have the same tech-support. The world is out-sourced.
It's easy enough to fix, but how many average users will pop up the command prompt and type "C:\>convert c: /fs:ntfs"?
Made me laugh so hard I fell off my chair!!!! Most of my customers fall out when you try to get them to go to a command prompt.
The PC hardware industry is one of the few remaining bastions of nearly pure free enterprise. What one vendor does well to gain market share can be relatively easily dupicated by another.
As Capitalism is intended: the consumer wins... and wins... and wins.
As of the 1 GHz Pentium III -- roughly -- the home PC entered what had been the realm of the supercomputer (Cray 1). It takes even less time now for supercomputer power to become average user power than it did then.
How I love free enterprise. :-)
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.
See Korn's post at #22. Apparently, Acer thinks it's a good idea. *shrug*
Made me laugh so hard I fell off my chair!!!! Most of my customers fall out when you try to get them to go to a command prompt.
Yeah, I could almost hear users' hearts racing and see their eyes glazing over as I typed it. :-)
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
Had a late year shopping so when the Wii’s were all sold out I got THREE acers for my little girls for Christmas. They love them and so do I
Good cheap machines
Anymore comments about Acer laptops?
Yes.
Can you get it without paying the Micro$oft tax?
I do like picking the parts for my work machines but wow, it's starting to get to where it's just too expensive, maybe better to buy and toss after a year.
Looks like no, for now.
They used to have a Linux model, but I don't see one now.
Well all of the above is true except for apple - they have been able to build a strong brand - using all sorts of strategies - both engineering based as well as marketing based.
You think the PC industry's growth and success hasn't had an effect on Apple? I guarantee you it has.
Just as AMD's success has made Intel produce a better product at a lower price, the PC universe has continued to improve on all the Mac's dominant areas. That forces Apple to continuously improve the Mac as well, all thanks to free enterprise.
What you say is true, but that wasn’t really my point. My point was that it’s hard to build brand loyalty in the PC manufacturing business (hence the rises and falls) but the sole exception to that rule has been apple. Which I don’t say as an apple fanboy - just simply making the observation.
Ahh, OK. Gotcha.
You're right about that, with the possible exception of Dell. They've been around from the start, and more or less doing it right too.
I have a three-year-old Acer Travelmate 8204, and it’s easily the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I’m the kind of person that’s been building their own computers since they were in their teens (mid-90s) and has run the range of OSs - Linux (since Slackware ‘95), FreeBSD, Windows (since Windows For Workgroups 3.1), and even OSX (on my Dell Mini 9), and I work as a software engineer, so I think I’m pretty up-to-date on this 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.
At the time (not sure about now), it was hard to to find a laptop for as cheap as I did that had the resolution I wanted (1680x1050), and it looks great on my TV too.
The only issue I’ve had with it is that I had to replace the CPU fan (and occasionally I have to clean the dust out of it), and that was a little difficult to find (look on Ebay). Other than that, if you know what you’re doing, Acers are a great computer.
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!
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