NEWS : Acer makes the shoddiest laptops, according to IT professionals

yes, but that also means that acer could be more prone to these problems. seeing that novice users will treat dells, hp's etc just the same.

 

And that has nothing to do with build quality.

My 3810t runs good, only issues were the recall and the palm rest is fading a bit. My 2nd 1830T so far has no issues (first one before I broke it had a keyboard with plenty of flex).

 

Thats how my 7740 serires is,very easy to clean,compared to my old compaq,now that thing was a a pain to clean.

 

Maybe just it's too cheap and competitive. In its early years some model are indeed not reliable, so probably those professionals just remembered.

but I still think Thinkpad is the best. Mine is 7 years old and the screen is still like new. No dead dot. back light maybe requires warm up now but brightness is still the same.

 

I think this is a bit of a misnomer. Acer clearly sell more laptops than most manufacturers so they have more products being used by the public than most. This means they will have more laptops failing or being seen as shoddy by the public or IT professionals even.

Actually acer make some fabulous laptops and I would buy one if i were after a mainstream laptop

 

Acer doesn't sell much more than toshiba/sony/asus, but from personal experience acers have the same failure rate as consumer class hp's and dells, which can be pretty high. I wouldn't buy one unless desperate since my dad's old acer was a real POS

That said I think a lot of these little articles and polls are biased and don't look at the micro, just the macro - they never specify models or even lineups, or business class vs gaming class vs consumer class, which is really important. Obviously a $500 consumer lappy with tech 1/2 gens behind is going to crap out sooner than something more updated/expensive, it'd be intersting to have a class+manufacturer breakdown done (spoiler: hp business class is top quality, but their consumer class is terrible).

 

Acer's build quality is not on par with their competitors. That is evident even by looking at the latest Timeline X and comparing them to their closest counterparts from, say, ASUS.

Acer is the price leader. And being cheapest comes at a cost: lower quality. After all, Acer laptops are manufactured by the same firms as competitors' laptops (e.g., Quanta, Compal). They must cut corners somewhere in order to deliver a lower price.

 

I used to have an Acer Aspire 5003WMLi back in 2007 which looked similar to the post made by Phil. It was cheap to buy at first, but within 3 months i've sold it off. I had a dead pixel from day 1, build quality felt flimsy particular the lid area, ran noisy and was very hot (don't think the AMD Turion 64 processor helped) so I had to severely downclock it to make it run cool. The engineering for the cooling was very bad, I thought this was going to be an issue in the long term which is why I sold it off. It's probably one of the worst laptops i've ever owned, a quick lookup on the model today and unsurprisingly the common complaint is the heating issues.

It's not just build quality IT professionals look for, it's the aftersales support if things do go wrong, how easy to acquire parts and replacements. I read horror stories about Acer support in the UK which put me off from the brand. I still don't know if it improved over the years, a type up of "Acer Support Review" on Google UK brings up top 4 searches that consists of customer complaints and hardly any praises which raises a lot of questions about the brand's care of its customers.

 

i mentioned that because ease of servicability is one aspect IT professionals look at, and the survey apparently was amongst IT professionals

 

Lol, yep.. every ThinkPad and Lenovo ThinkPad i've owned has been brilliant, my new W700 feels as good as my T43, it's a 17" tank of a laptop... both in size, build quality, but also in gaming

 

Agreed.

Same thing was said about Hyundai cars. Then the Genesis came and turned things around. Infiniti had the G35 do the same.

As with many things, the further back in the past one goes to find examples, the less relevance those examples have to bear on the question at hand.

It's the present time examples that make the most sense to look at.

 

In my experience I have had Hp's fail the most. (dv9200 series) I had 2 d.o.a. right from the box! Those were a higher-end consumer model. As far as the notebook I consider the worst was a few Toshiba consumer laptops don't remember the models. 15.4" with the x2 chips and ati 3200 gpu's.......... god it was my first experience with a laptop overheating under normal use..... on a chillmat/laptopcooler!!! I sent the ones I had in 3 times before I had a friend modify the fan settings. Made them noisy as hell but they never did overheat again. After that I had to send the in for repair of the touch pad buttons on both laptops broke. they undid the fan setting and they started to over heat again GRRRRR!!! So I had him modify them again. As far as the best laptops in my opinion I really have liked Asus products. My first asus was the g2s it was sooo much cheaper than any dell hp or others with similar components and I could do heavy computing and grafics without it getting hot on my lap! I really like their quality.

 

I bought an Acer Aspire 5920G in oktober 2007, and if I would have known the statistical data from this report or the somewhat older squaretrade survey I would never have purchased one. But, as it turns out, after 33 months it still runs well. Aside from the problems with my 8600m gt I had last year during the summer (environmental temperatures were around 35-40 celcius) when playing cod4 mp for hours which lead to rainbow sparks and purple triangle lines, I haven't had any issues and the gpu issue hasn't occured this summer anymore.

Looking back I think the 5920G was the best possible purchase I could ever have made at that time (belgium had very few brands & models atm). I wanted a laptop that would last me 4 years, both for gaming and for plain office work. As it turns out, not only did this laptop not fail, it also has a gpu with a mxm slot so I can upgrade to a much stronger gpu. All that for a very decent price (1300€ , especialy compared to brands like sony where I certainly would have payed 500 euros more and still would have received weaker hardware.

Whats the point in having so much better quality that will last you 5+ years (in the same or higher pricerange) if you will be tired of the hardware after a louzy 6 months. IMO the quality of acer is good enough, and when you have a limited budget, you can't argue with acers competitve prices.