Acer is fine if you like devices absolutely crammed with crapware and you don't have to support them.
-Carol Haynes
I guess this is another example of YMMV. So don't automatically buy into any one person's recommendations. Not even mine!
I can't say I've ever had serious problems with Acer. Their track record hasn't been flawless. True, their tech support has been so-so, like most other companies lately. But I have yet to finish up with a situation that's been left completely unresolved. Which is more than I can say for some of the bigger players whose names start with an I, a T, or an H.
Dell is the only company I've ever dealt with where I had to make a threat on two occasions to get them to honor the terms of their warranty. Other techs in my area sing Dell's praises up and down. My own experience with them has been very mixed - and not good at all when it came to laptops.
I will agree about the crapware issue Carol raises however. It is annoying now that it seems to be standard operating to procedure to bundle junk in with this class of product. I can't say if one company is worse than another doing this because I automatically scrub and groom every box I install no matter who it's made by. (PC Decrapifier has been a godsend for much of that BTW.) As far as I'm concerned, no crapware is acceptable so I don't care of there's one or twenty titles on the machine. They all get removed. And our 'delousing' process is fairly automated so it's not as annoying for us as it once was.
Some common headaches may also be less an issue for my business since we don't just "drop a box at the door" as the saying goes. We're not really a retail operation. 90% of our clients are SMBs. And everything that goes out of our shop is specc'ed, customized, and configured for the specific client and their requirements. We don't sell unopened boxes per se. We operate more like an old-fashioned guitar or bicycle shop. If you want a vanilla computer straight from the manufacturer, you don't need us to sell it to you. Just go online or stop at one of the 'big box' stores, and they'll be happy to get you one. Feel free to give us a call when there's actually some value we can add.
Maybe I should also point out that since my business deals almost exclusively with other businesses, we're not often
plagued entertained by all those vexing media and driver issues a consumer computer dealer gets to resolve. Nor do we get caught up wasting hours trying to solve problems that occur when trying to integrate poorly engineered entertainment products or oddball components into an otherwise standard system. My hat is off to the overclockers and game machine customizers in that respect. They have a much tougher job than we do getting everything to work correctly.
So maybe I should have said for what we do, and the type of client we support, Acer has been a good choice for a budget machine.
