7 ms·

I purchased one of these computers for my child. It made a loud buzzing noise and turned off last week. I discovered the locked BIOS for myself when I tried to

I purchased one of these computers for my child. It made a loud buzzing noise and turned off last week. I discovered the locked BIOS for myself when I tried to boot from a USB to diagnose the problem. Acer wants $619.99 to diagnose it at their repair center, since it is 2 weeks out of warranty.

bogota 5y ago
Holy shit. I never had a good experience with acer but now i will never be buying one again.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I’ve been out of the Windows/PC scene for a decade, but even in the 2000s, I was under the impression that Acer was a choice to sacrifice quality for a lower price.
- piceas 5y ago
  I'm a long term IBM/Lenovo T/X series user with a side of yoga. Lots to like but plenty of problems too. Overall better than a cheaper brand like Acer from what I could see from my friends devices. But there have been some low points. Dodgey motherboards on multiple generations of T series laptops, Superfish and whitelisted wifi cards on the yoga, and generally poor quality screens for a variety of reasons gives one pause before buying the next one. For the first time in a couple of decades I've taken the risk and branched out to the Acer Spin 5. I am pleasantly surprised. Not perfect either but not nearly as cheap as I had feard. A Bios update was essential for it to be functional. But that was true of some models in the T series in the past.
LegitShady 5y ago
Some years ago I had an acer laptop with a discrete video card that would get so hot it would start having graphical errors. I installed bios updates, made sure the intakes weren't blocked, reinstalled drivers, reformatted the machine, etc etc. I spent days and days trying to solve the issue myself. I sent it into acer (under warranty!) because i couldn't play any games on it for longer than half an hour. They sent it back to me saying they couldn't find anything wrong with it. The laptop would still crash within 30-45 minutes of playing a game. Whenever people ask me to recommend computers or computer accessories, I never recommend acer. I've never bought another acer product since and I have never been dissatisfied with that decision.
xnyan 5y ago
In college I sold a lot of laptops for best buy. Acer often had great specs, seemingly solid looking hardware that was clearly influenced by good designs (Apple) and a great price for the specs and features. All laptops have problems, but Acer was by far the worst - More often then not, the problems stemmed from bad heat management (the most common killer of laptops IME) and quality control that was seemingly laser focused on avoiding problems for exactly as long as the warranty lasted. PSA: Lenovo has tons of problems w/r/t how they operate as a company, but the thinkpad is far and away the best overall non-mac laptop brand you can readily buy anywhere in the world.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I just use the Best Buy warranty. I always buy it and haven't paid for a laptop since the one I went to university with. I just buy the warranty again. On my fourth laptop now.
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    Interesting way to work the system of crappy hardware. They just keep breaking and you just keep getting replacements eh?
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Pretty much. They have lasted between 1 and 2.5 years. I can usually negotiate something slightly better each time as well. Hardware works fine until something goes wrong and I drop it off a Geek Squad, use one of my other computers for a week, and then go select a replacement. It also covers charger replacements and accidental damage, so if your charger frays, they replace it (a big issue with Acer and Asus). I grant that the Geek Squad people aren't great at fixing things, but replacing? Excellent.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  The dell xps 13 is a fantastic alternative to the thinkpad. It can come with Ubuntu preloaded and fully configured, something that was a major plus for me.
skissane 5y ago
We bought our son a consumer HP laptop. Its BIOS isn't locked, but has few settings exposed. HP intentionally cripples its consumer laptop BIOS to hide most of the settings. I can't get WoWLAN to work and wonder if the BIOS settings are why but there are no WoL settings exposed in the BIOS. There used to be a hidden key sequence to reveal an "Advanced" menu. It changed a few times. But on the more recent versions, there is no "Advanced" menu any more, it is removed completely. (They use InsydeH20 BIOS; you can find some reverse engineering tool to decode its menu structure – I heard rumours on forums the hidden menu was completely removed, the tool confirmed it.) May still be possible to inspect and change some undocumented settings with some more in-depth BIOS hacking. But I'm scared I'm going to brick the computer by doing that. I gave up. I guess next time I buy a computer I'll keep this in mind.
eps 5y ago
Back in late '00 I had a top of the line Acer. Two years of warranty. A week after the warranty ended the display lost 50% of its brightness, a day later the trackpad died and in a couple of days later speakers went kaput. Was rock solid while on warranty.

bogota 5y ago

Holy shit. I never had a good experience with acer but now i will never be buying one again.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I’ve been out of the Windows/PC scene for a decade, but even in the 2000s, I was under the impression that Acer was a choice to sacrifice quality for a lower price.
piceas 5y ago
I'm a long term IBM/Lenovo T/X series user with a side of yoga. Lots to like but plenty of problems too. Overall better than a cheaper brand like Acer from what I could see from my friends devices. But there have been some low points. Dodgey motherboards on multiple generations of T series laptops, Superfish and whitelisted wifi cards on the yoga, and generally poor quality screens for a variety of reasons gives one pause before buying the next one. For the first time in a couple of decades I've taken the risk and branched out to the Acer Spin 5. I am pleasantly surprised. Not perfect either but not nearly as cheap as I had feard. A Bios update was essential for it to be functional. But that was true of some models in the T series in the past.

LegitShady 5y ago

Some years ago I had an acer laptop with a discrete video card that would get so hot it would start having graphical errors. I installed bios updates, made sure the intakes weren't blocked, reinstalled drivers, reformatted the machine, etc etc. I spent days and days trying to solve the issue myself. I sent it into acer (under warranty!) because i couldn't play any games on it for longer than half an hour. They sent it back to me saying they couldn't find anything wrong with it. The laptop would still crash within 30-45 minutes of playing a game. Whenever people ask me to recommend computers or computer accessories, I never recommend acer. I've never bought another acer product since and I have never been dissatisfied with that decision.

xnyan 5y ago

In college I sold a lot of laptops for best buy. Acer often had great specs, seemingly solid looking hardware that was clearly influenced by good designs (Apple) and a great price for the specs and features. All laptops have problems, but Acer was by far the worst - More often then not, the problems stemmed from bad heat management (the most common killer of laptops IME) and quality control that was seemingly laser focused on avoiding problems for exactly as long as the warranty lasted. PSA: Lenovo has tons of problems w/r/t how they operate as a company, but the thinkpad is far and away the best overall non-mac laptop brand you can readily buy anywhere in the world.

MattGaiser 5y ago
I just use the Best Buy warranty. I always buy it and haven't paid for a laptop since the one I went to university with. I just buy the warranty again. On my fourth laptop now.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Interesting way to work the system of crappy hardware. They just keep breaking and you just keep getting replacements eh?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Pretty much. They have lasted between 1 and 2.5 years. I can usually negotiate something slightly better each time as well. Hardware works fine until something goes wrong and I drop it off a Geek Squad, use one of my other computers for a week, and then go select a replacement. It also covers charger replacements and accidental damage, so if your charger frays, they replace it (a big issue with Acer and Asus). I grant that the Geek Squad people aren't great at fixing things, but replacing? Excellent.
alasdair_ 5y ago
The dell xps 13 is a fantastic alternative to the thinkpad. It can come with Ubuntu preloaded and fully configured, something that was a major plus for me.

skissane 5y ago

We bought our son a consumer HP laptop. Its BIOS isn't locked, but has few settings exposed. HP intentionally cripples its consumer laptop BIOS to hide most of the settings. I can't get WoWLAN to work and wonder if the BIOS settings are why but there are no WoL settings exposed in the BIOS. There used to be a hidden key sequence to reveal an "Advanced" menu. It changed a few times. But on the more recent versions, there is no "Advanced" menu any more, it is removed completely. (They use InsydeH20 BIOS; you can find some reverse engineering tool to decode its menu structure – I heard rumours on forums the hidden menu was completely removed, the tool confirmed it.) May still be possible to inspect and change some undocumented settings with some more in-depth BIOS hacking. But I'm scared I'm going to brick the computer by doing that. I gave up. I guess next time I buy a computer I'll keep this in mind.

eps 5y ago

Back in late '00 I had a top of the line Acer. Two years of warranty. A week after the warranty ended the display lost 50% of its brightness, a day later the trackpad died and in a couple of days later speakers went kaput. Was rock solid while on warranty.