ACER Review

Overall Rating

Their laptop products are decent.

Acer has the worse customer support of any computer manufacturer I have ever dealt with. Read some of the excepts from a letter I have written to Acer. You have to write them a letter because they don't have email to file a complaint.

The following excerpts are based on 3 different situations in dealing wih Acer tech support.

1. After I bought my computer (Aspire 5520) I upgraded the OS from Vista Home to Vista Professional. The upgrade went well except for one driver I couldn ' t find. It was the driver to display volume bar across the bottom of the screen when you adjust the volume control. I wrote to Acer tech support and got an email back berating me about something to the nature that we do not support OS ' s which are not the same as the OS that came with the computer. I WENT FROM VISTA HOME TO VISTA PROFESSIONAL, HOW MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE IS THAT? I eventually found the driver amongst the backup software which came with the computer. It took me about an hour of my time but I found it without any help from Acer.

2.The second time around with my computer I asked for information about the video card and the driver as my computer would hang when streaming extended periods of video from the internet such as Netflix. I also informed your tech support it would play a DVD just fine but would only hang on streaming video. I asked if there was a new driver out or should I just uninstall and then reinstall the driver. Your tech support replied to me: BACKUP ALL YOUR IMPORTANT INFORMATION AND USE THE INSTALL DISK TO FORMAT YOUR DRIVE AND REINSTALL YOUR COMPUTER SOFTWARE.
I ask you, what kind of technical support advice is that? That is without a doubt the dumbest most absurd answer for a minor problem I have ever heard. How can that even be classified as technical support? That was a shot in the dark answer because somebody was either too stupid or too lazy to formulate in their mind what the problem is to create an appropriate answer. You don ' t wipe out an entire computer operating system for a simple video issue. That is completely asinine.

3.As for my mother ' s computer, an Aspire 5602, she had a hard drive failure and it was way past warranty. I bought her a new hard drive and loaded an old XP Pro 32 bit on it in lieu of her old XP Home software. She could no longer find her recovery software which was cause for the upgrade to XP Pro.
Everything works great. I just can ' t find the drivers for 1. A MASS STORAGE CONTROLLER and 2. MODEM ON A HIGH DEFINITION AUDIO DEVICE.
I wrote to Acer tech support again and explained the situation and that it ' s my mother ' s computer which is no longer under warranty. Now your tech support WON ' T EVEN ANSWER THE SUPPORT QUESTION.
I called your customer support today and could not even talk to a human being unless I had a serial number to key into the system. Everything else kept telling me to go to the website. I was at work when I called and fortunately I had my laptop with me and keyed in the serial number for it. After 3 phone calls and figuring things out I was finally able to speak to a human being.
He of course directed me to the website. I told him the issues with the website were the drivers were not all available. He told me yeah I know that. You have to buy the recovery software to load all the drivers.

Acer will never get another penny from me.