All I wanted was a new keyboard which I wanted to install myself. Rest of the machine was fine. I phoned ACER and they duly informed me that they are not allowed to sell the part over the counter and that I had to book the machine in. After trying to explain that I don’t care about warranties and all that (was no longer under warranty anyway), I eventually gave up and booked the thing in.

Well long story short, 1 month down the line (for a keyboard!), we eventually got the laptop back after plenty of fights. But during the 1 month we got; 1 x new Mainboard, 1 x new CPU, 1 x new HDD, new memory(oh, and a new keyboard). Basically a completely new notebook in a old shell

ACER SA then had the nerve of wanting to charge us about R10000 or so for the repairs (damage they caused), which we bluntly refused. After some more fighting, we were not charged a cent – which I will acknowledge was pretty cool from them. Ater all this, I was told that I apparantly could have bought the part over the counter… you don’t say…

The incompetence and unhelpfulness of their staff is probably what pissed me off most, not so much the product. And that a call never gets answered within +- 30 minutes. I ended up just driving a 100km round trip a couple of times to follow up as phoning them does not help.

The few ACERs we do have left, all get installed from volume XP/Vista cds and only the needed drivers loaded. None of the ACER e-whatever apps. We now only use HP business notebooks, basically no bloat software on and better quality imo.

According to Acer the supplied “rescue disk” can do a clean install of Windows XP, with just the required drivers, but I have doubts about that too.

I’ve owned two Acer notebooks over the last 5 years and am a happy customer. When my first notebook’s LCD started giving problems I sent it off to Acer Europe (luckily I wasn’t in SA at the time, based on your experience) and they replaced the faulty motherboard as well as the keyboard (some of my keys were worn down) at no extra cost! Granted it was still under warranty, but they went the extra mile and I was stoked.

Can’t hate their bloat that comes with the default OS install any more than I already do though. I’ve tried to disable as much of it as possible. One of their “Acer eWhatever” apps would give me a Vista bluescreen every time I closed my notebook lid, even though I’d configured it to not do anything. I reckon that’s why Vista has such a bad rep, because standalone and on a machine that it was designed for, it’s pretty damn solid.

Wish I could do a clean install but Acer didn’t provide me with the original Vista copy!