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“Poor Products, Worse Service”

Written on: 12/08/2012 by Quant314 (2 reviews written)

First, grab some pop-corn. Sitting comfortably?

How I wish I'd seen the other reviews for this company before I bought a computer from them (over a year ago now).

All I wanted was a fairly basic, inexpensive PC, and Acer systems seemed to fit the bill. For a while, everything was fine, and I had no reason to contact Acer. Unfortunately, this changed shortly after the warranty on the system expired.

The (onboard) graphics card started failing. It was a little frustrating to have this happen so soon after the warranty ran out, but my initial reaction was "oh well, these things happen, I'll just go and buy a low end, standalone graphics card".

Unfortunately, in addition to my first error (buying from Acer), I compounded the error in that I bought a micro-ATX system from them, which meant I needed to purchase a low-profile graphics card. I decided to contact Acer to see if they could provide any info as to what cards would be compatible with the truly pathetic 220W power supply (yes, they still make them) in the system. I acknowledged that my system was out of warranty, but all I wanted was some information. Cue crickets. Over two weeks later I finally got a response, which can be summarised as follows "Your system is out of warranty". Really? I had no idea.

As I didn't fancy waiting another two weeks for a response, I just went ahead and bought the lowest spec low profile GPU I could find and fitted that. It didn't work, the power supply was just too weak. So, my next effort, get a decent power supply. Which introduced me to the next problem - non-standard components. The form factor of Acer's micro-ATX systems is such that standard micro-ATX PSUs don't fit inside them! Seriously. So, I emailed Acer (still being polite at this point) and asked if they could let me know where I could get hold of the proprietary PSUs they used. More crickets. I never heard back from them.

I continued on with the ailing system for a little while, simply accepting that watching a DVD was out of the question. Then the system decided to periodically go on strike. I'd switch it on, hear the fans whirring, but nothing would happen. When researching this symptom online I found it to be a very common occurrence with Acer systems, and no one seemed to have a consistent solution to the problem. My solution was this; randomly disconnect and reattach various cables and peripherals, switch it on and off somewhere between 3 and 15 times and eventually it would boot properly. Suffice it to say, I didn't put up with this for very long, and decided to buy a new system (not from Acer, in case there is any doubt).

This company is a complete joke, and it gets worse, I've had the misfortune of dealing with this company over a separate faulty system (not an Acer), for which they turned out to have the maintenance contract (arggghhhhh!). I'll write a separate review for that (companies this bad deserve the additional low ratings!). Let's just say, if you want a low quality system, with non-standard components, and the worst customer service experience you'll ever have... choose Acer.