Disappointed in my ACER 5102WMLi - pls offer yr consolations or advice

Hello all. Got ASPIRE 5102 over a month ago (right when it came out), but had a hernia operation so I am just coming to know it, finally, now... I, too, am battling the video driver update issue, which perhaps reveals my minimal level of expertise in these matters. That technological dragon, I believe I can slay on my own, but in reading these and other posts on the ACER 5102WLMi, I am disturbed to find how totally shafted I am to have bought mine from zipzoomfly.com... In contrast to several different post-ers here, I have only 1 gig total of ram (some have 2), NO WEBCAM(!), NO bluetooth (at least one user on a different site appears to have it on his), 4200 rpm drive (some have 5400)... At $900, I have less functionality than many buyers that appear to have purchased theirs for only 2/3 of my cost. WHAT UP WITH THAT, YO? ;-)
(those of you more fortunate, pls don't rub it in...)
To top it all off, I was unable to find any detailed pictures of this laptop, and falsely assumed it had the curved keyboard of other Acers, which I wanted! - yes, I know, my bad)
Is there any recourse for me? any way to retrofit the bluetooth (it annoyingly has the switch!), or does anyone have a webcam for a charity case? Somebody pls make me feel better.
THAT SAID, this is a sweet computer, for what's in it, but IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING BUYING ONE, don't make my mistake. check all specs as well as compare costs (I thought I had!)...
Also, when Vista gets more thoroughly debugged, it had better work well on this laptop, cause it was advertised as Vista-capable, dammit.

thanks for reading,
- baron

 

Sorry to hear that. What I find strange is the fact u dont have a cam?!? No bluetooth ?!
What did they give you ? Some piece of crap? On the Acer's site its explicitly said that all 5100s have a webcam.
U can get a blutooth usb extension. This can be solved.
Hey, 4200rpm is not that bad unless ur a maniac and want everthing to be fine.
An external cam is about 30$!

Get ur lap optimized for performance, do all the tweaks(u can find them in this forum) and u get a really respectable machine.

 

THX, Thief! I feel slightly better already. Yeah, I am gonna call Acer about the webcam bit. It's pretty lame to have it on some issues of one model, and not another, especially bc Acer doesn't design to order like Dell, so you would think the specs posted on their or any site for a specific model would be universal. Bottom line, I guess, is I'm scarred but smarter... Main complaint is I feel blind-sided for paying more and getting less than others who got the same model. Aside from that, this seems to be a great computer, altho clock-wise (so to speak) it apparently underperforms a similar speed core duo. Anybody know if there are situations where it will perform better than core duo, or have functionality that 32-bit systems don't or can't? (ie, Vista, right? what about audio production? does higher bitrate CPU translate to superior performance there, or am I crossing my bits?) thanks in advance. it kicks butt that forums like this exist, and I look forward to sharing my own wisdom, as my expertise grows. PEACE.

 

How the FU*K did they leave the Webcam out? Not trying to be funny but is there a gap in the middle of your screen.

I bought mines at Comp-USA, It was on sale at $899. It came with 2GB and the Cam. No bluetooth, but I just got a $25 usb bluetooth. and my harddrive is the same as yours. (4200rpm).

I did research first, and found alot of differ specs for this laptop. At the price I was getting I was satisfied tho. Can you return it to zipzoomfly or atleast exchange it?

Yours is the first I heard without a cam tho.

 

Thats a good point. If youre laptop really is the 5100 (it should read Aspire 5100 at the bottom right of yout screen) and its missing the webcam, it should have a gap at the top middle of your screen. If all of this is true, Acer must have made a really big mistake. The onyl conclusion I can make is that Acer put the components of the 5100 into the chasis of 3100 (looks the same as 5100 except w/o webcam). Also, did you specifically order BlueTooth; mine has a BlueTooth button but it isn't functional (the indicator lght doesn't turn on when i slide it), so i guess mine doesn't have it. Did anyone get the Acer Arcade with thiers? On the Futureshop specs, its says it included acer arcade, but mine doesn't have it. Oh well, Media Center is better at least.
And about Vista, the 5100 is Vista Premium Ready (see my avatar), so don't worry about it. I'm a newbie at updating video drivers too, tell me how it goes - I'm going to try it now.

Sorry to hear about this incident.

 

this just goes to show that no matter what you purchase in life (food, clothing, cars, electronic equipment, a house, ETC.) that you need to do your homework. I hate to see customers come into my shop with a "best buy special" in which they went out and spend $2,000 on a sony viao desktop that could have cost them 1,200 if they built it themselves or if they went somewhere else. Instead they end up with in store bloat and costs and they end up with oem hardware and sh!tty support. <---- dell anyone?

No matter what you do, you can almost always do it better and cheapter if you do it yourself or do your homework first. Sorry to hear about your mishap, learn from it and move on

--ssx--

 

For what it's worth, I've found that there are MANY different versions of the 5102WLMi.

Even NewEgg has two different models, one with a 100gb Hard Drive and 512MB of Ram, another with a 160gb Hard Drive and 2gb of Ram.

In fact, they recently changed it again....a few weeks ago they had a different 5102WLMi that came with XP Pro instead of MCE, and ONE gig of Ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834115254
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834115274

If you scroll down to the specs on the links above, you'll notice the more expensive one actually has a 4200rpm Drive where the 'cheaper' one has a 5400rpm Drive.

Mine from Circuit City came with a 4200rpm Drive.
It was 'on sale' for 750.00...as of this post, it's 800.00 with rebate. (Normally 900.00).
It also came with a Web Cam and 1GB of Ram, but there are clearly many different versions of the exact same 5102WLMi.

Furthermore, some of them DON'T come with a web cam....this is intentional. (look carefully at all of the customer reviews and comments for different versions at both sites).

Go to Circuit Citys web site and you will see it is quite different than BOTH versions of the same model offered at NewEgg.
http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Acer...56035/catOid/-12963/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

Why Acer did this I'm not sure, but it's not that your Web Cam is 'missing', but simply that you got one of the models where it was ommited intentionally.

I agree completely with SSX4life...doing your homework is the best advice one can give.
There have been times I've learned this the hard way myself.

 

Yes, thats true. Ive just realized this for myself. I found that there is a 5100 that comes without the webcam and bluetooth and sells for $949US from the acer site! I got mine for only $899 CAN and mine has the webcam and exactly same specs. So... i guess you'll just have to learn.

 

well that sucks!, call acer. and argue that it has the same model number why should it not have the webcam,

could have been a manufacturing ops and acer is just going to sell all of them off under the same model number(stupid)

acer support if fairly good but i don't know how they would handle something like this