Acer Aspire E1

Have and always will have Acer laptop – Great step up from my Acer 5742, no issues fast and efficient, went with a i7 and up the RAM to 8GB but have always enjoyed them and always recommend Acer's cause of price and works really well, only down side is it's still 2.4GHZ wireless but all laptops but the new ones were that so no biggy  Show details

Acer Notebooks - Customer Service needs fiixing – I have been in the IT industry for many years, sold 1000's of Acer PC's/Notebooks/servers. Since moving into IT consulting, we have referred several hundred sales to Acer. We've used and own personal Acer notebooks & tablets. So you could say that we are loyal Acer supporters. This was in large part due to the excellent relationship we had… Read more

with them and as a direct reflection of their warranty and support services which used to be examplary.

Now to the present situation

I ordered a new Acer E1-572 for my daughter as a birthday present in April 2014 with the extended warranty to take it to 2 years.

As the unit was being shipped to me so that I could prepare it for my daughter (burn-in to ensure all systems OK, remove bloatware, install all Win 8 updates, anti-malware & office) who is a uni. student and then being forwarded to her interstate, it was more than 7 days from the invoice date to when she attempted to register the warranty extension. So Acer's site wouldn't accept it.

I later called Acer to attempt to resolve this and they just blew me off saying it was too late.

PC's have a 2 year statutory warranty. No big deal we would just have to make a claim on that basis if something goes wrong.

mid-2015 she said the DVD/CD drive had stopped working. Believing it to be a Windows 8 problem, it wasn't affecting her uni use of the notebook and as she needs her notebook for uni. we let it go until she came up during the end of year break.

Turns out it was a hardware problem - Optical Disk Drive is dead (confirmed by swapping ODD's with my E1-572).

OK, start the process with Acer to log the problem and get it resolved (detailing the history including the Care Pack registration etc.). They said they'd 'check if we can book the unit for one off courtesy repair' apart from the Care Pack we purchased and had no luck getting registered.

This morning I had a call from the Acer Care Plan people to say that they were sticking to their procedure and as it wasn't registered within the time allowed they were not honouring their warranty extension.

I received an email advising they want $219 to effect the repair which entails removing the ODD replacing with the $25 part, testing it works and sending back.

It's such a pity that Acer dropped their warranty and support standards to such a low level.

Sorry Acer you fail on a lot of levels - your support processes, dis-interest in your customers legitimate claims and lack of interest in the loyalty shown to your brand.

PS. pror to calling Acer I emailed MSY for contact details of who handles RA's in their company - I'll let you know if/when I hear back but I'm not holding my breath at all.

UPDATE

After some wrangling and the issue being escalated within Acer, I had a call to say they would honour the warranty extension that we bought.

Their processes still suck and their internal systems are a mess -

It shouldn't take the dramas that it has to get what we paid for.

I have had to give the same information to 3 different departments and undergo the same questioning 3 times to get to a point where the unit will be picked up for repair.

Their incident reporting system defaults the status to 'Solved' each time their people reply.

The file upload system has a ridiculously small limit meaning that proof of purchase (or other) images need to be reduced in size/quality to upload.

Hopefully with clear open feedback from their customers and a willing management they can turn it around and once again be a supplier of computers that's respected for their customer service and product warranty.

UPDATE 2

Friday came around and no courier. Call to Support - told that their procedure is they wait 2 days from logging the claim to having the device picked up. So 1st time around they lied to me.

Escalated to a manager who while unable to fix that stuff up, did make commitments that were kept - docs arrived within 20 mins, Courier organised for next bus. day.

Courier has just collected so, we've lost a bit over a week to get to this point. We'll see what happens from here

Still no response from MSY - no surprise really

FINAL UPDATE

Things had gotten busy and I have been remiss in updating this review.

Acer expedited the repair and returned the notebook just in the nick of time before my daughter had to fly home. To date I have had no further advice of issues with this notebook.

Works for me – I see this laptop hasn't had great reviews, but I've found it to be perfectly useable. We bought it from Domayne to replace an old, failing Toshiba. I did have some trouble after I downloaded antivirus software, not realising there was already a trial programme preloaded. The IT guy at Domayne was great, and talked me through restoring it. The… Read more

fault was mine, but I'm happy to share the lesson - check you uninstall the existing programmes you don't want before installing your favourites. Never had an Acer before, but it's working fine for me.

Don't buy this product – I have had this laptop for just over 2 months, it's faulty, unreliable and a waste of money. As a school student submitting assignments on time is very important, however this laptop decides to update with a 10 minute warning and there is no way to turn this function off, updating apps I don't even use. Sometimes the updates take over 40 minutes… Read more

and happens almost every 4 days. It freezes regularly and sometimes continues to scroll and to escape this I use ctrl/alt/del but often this doesn't work and the only option left is to switch off the computer. This is an extremely unreliable product, and not worth the money spent, so as a warning to others thinking of purchasing this consider a different brand/model.

Costly before i used it !!! – I bought this laptop about a year ago brand new on Ebay but with no warranty ( Private seller ) and tried to connect it to my Wi-Fi. Not a good introduction to my new laptop when i could not get a strong connection but my partner's computer worked just fine. Hmmm so i called a technician and $200.00 later it was fixed. The wireless adapter inbuilt… Read more

in this computer is crap and needs a usb adapter to connect to Wi-Fi. I have since read that this is not unique to my computer and others had the same problem. Another ultra crappy thing about this computer is there incredibly is no caps lock indicator and when i type in a case sensitive password i have no idea if the caps are on or not.!!!! Other than that it's ok.

Not happy with ACER laptop – I bought the laptop from office works. Got it home and the machine crashed each time I tried to set up the Microsoft login. I took straight t back to workforces who replaced it straight away and without any hassle at all. Thanks office works. A couple months out of warranty the laptop charging port or DC adaptor became loose/ I called the… Read more

repair line who were helpful asked me to send the laptop to the repair centre free of charge. The returned it saying the repair was successful, but it never really felt right t connecting the charger a couple of months later I can't charge the laptop and the connection is faulty. Once again called up the acer after care people who said to send it in free of charge. The result was to fix the DC adaptor I would need to pay $220 almost 50% of the original purchase price.

Due to my experience e with ACER I would not recommend this manufacturer. I feel this is a design fault of the machine and it should've been fixed the first time correctly or at the very least the second time. But leaving me with a useless laptop that is not even 2 years old hasn't bought ACER customer loyalty from me.

Lots of problems with this machine, really lousy customer service – When typing it misses spaces, misses letters, types the wrong letters or suddenly switches to a different page. If it gets a bit confused about a web site it simply will not load it and you have to reboot it to get back onto the internet. e afI have to tip it on its side to find the DVD slot, even after six months of use. Customer service is just… Read more

about non existent. Warranty doesn't cover software (pre installed windows 8) after 6 months. Reasonablevalue for 8Gb RAM and 1TB disc, but I wish I'd bought something else. Not recommended.