I just can't recomend Acer anymore.

About 2 months ago if you asked me what kind of Laptop you should buy I would tell you: Apple, Asus, Toshiba, or ACER. The last of which happens to be the brand of my laptop. Excellent specs on this machine. Core Duo, 2 gigs of memory, a near HD quality LCD, 120 gig HDD, DVD-RAM drive, ATI x1400 video card. This thing will do any game technology outside of AA4X+ or DX10.

That is until the problems started. In the middle of the night my Ethernet went down. Grrrr. Ok I still have my WiFi. No believe it or not about a week later the Wifi went out too. This is at the end of the semester and I've got a million projects due so as you can guess this is both inconvenient and impossible for me to send the computer in for warranty work. So after the semester is over I fill out the form on ACER's website. It sends me a couple e-mails and frankly the whole thing is confusing. So I call them a few days later and the tech rep walked me though making sure it was a hardware problem. He suggest that I need to call my ISP. I tell him that another computer is on the same connection and it works and my problems happened regardless of the ISP. So he told me to send it in. I did. $27.xx at the post office grrr. Heather's laptop had a problem and DELL sent a guy to her house to fix it. I don't like Dell as anyone who knows me can testify, but that made me happy.

Anyway nearly a week to get the laptop there, over a week in repair, nearly a week to return and I have my laptop back from ACER. They had to replace the motherboard. The Ethernet worked, but the wireless still had the same problems. And the big problems started.

Two days after I received my laptop back a vertical line of discolored pixels appeared. About 3 inches in from the left and about 1 inch wide. As you can imagine that is annoying. The only way to fix it is to open and close the laptop. That of course kicks it into standby mode. Grrr. Well after a week of opening and closing the lid, the root of the problem spread branches. It was cracked and the screen totaled. So, I send it back in. I have difficulties with the website again, only this time they are because of not using the same e-mail.

Over a week since I sent in my laptop I get a phone call that screen breakage is not under warranty. I explained that the problem stared after their repair and that their repairs have warranties on the work done. Irregardless the repair would cost me $600. Which as I later found out was actually $649. Still they called it $600. They even told me that I should have called them when the problems started. I'm sorry I don't want to wait on the phone for 45 min for a problem you cause, and I can't just be without my laptop for months at a time. Frustrated I said good-bye.

The next day I called them back and they decided that would drop the labor fees and charge $200 less. Now I asked my pro computer repair friend and he informed me that an LCD replacement would take him 45 min; 1 hour to be conservative. So that comes out to a grand total of $200 an hour for labor. And $449 for the LCD itself. I told them that was too much, they said that was the cost of one. Now if you do any shopping for equivalent or identical LCD monitors you can buy them for about $200-$250. On top of that I'm looking at an ACER laptop with this exact monitor (the 15.4 CrystalBrite Widscreen) for $599 so you know it doesn't cost that much. Ok lets review: thats $200 an hour for tech the messed up my computer the first time, and about a 100% mark up on product. At what point does that get ridiculous?

I talk to a supervisor and get no where. They won't even suggest where the problem started. Ok fine, just go a head and fix the Wifi which is the second thing I requested. Nope. Won't fix that unless I let them fix my screen too.

I just can't recommend Acer anymore.