.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Why we can’t recommend the Acer Aspire One
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY As Heather’s previous laptop began to near the end of its lifespan, she began looking for a replacement. But her experience buying an Acer product mirrors many other people who’ve also bought Acer products and, at this time, we can’t recommend buying any Acer product, due to their rather poor reliability and support.
.OTHER
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Editor’s note
We don’t like to publish negative reviews without giving the company who makes the product a chance to have their say. We gave Acer the chance to respond to this article, but to date, they have not responded to our invitations for comment.
.END_SIDEBAR
As my previous laptop began to near the end of its lifespan, I began looking for a replacement. As a writer, I need portability for writing anywhere I feel like, but I also like a computer with good graphics and sound for video games. In the end, I replaced the laptop with two computers: an HP desktop and an Acer Aspire One netbook. This review focuses on the netbook.
I was frankly skeptical that a machine that fits into my purse would be able to do what I needed. But I fell in love with the Acer Aspire One at the store and couldn’t talk myself out of buying it. Consumer tip: If you, too, are the type of person who names your gadgets, do not name a gadget before buying it, because after that you’ll have to have it whether you want it or not.
.CALLOUT I have never been so unimpressed with a company.
Mine is the Aspire One 8.9, with a screen measuring 8.9" diagonally (hence the catchy name). (There is also an Aspire One 10.1, but the store where I shopped didn’t have them.) The entire unit is 9.8" long, 6.7" wide, and just over an inch thick when closed. Figure A shows the Aspire One sitting beside my old 15" laptop for size comparison.
.FIGPAIR A The Aspire One is significantly smaller than my old 15" laptop.
.H1 Hardware elements
The 2.2-pound Aspire One comes with either an 8GB or 16GB solid state hard drive or a 120GB traditional hard drive. Since I intend to use it almost exclusively for writing, I went with the cheaper 8GB drive. The netbook came with Windows XP (a Linux version is also available), and now that I’ve loaded it with Microsoft Office, anti-virus software, my three previously finished novels, the myriad of files for my current one, and MP3s of the two CDs I listen to while writing, I have only 615 megabytes free.
However, the unit has one SD card reader and one multi-card reader built in, and came with an 8GB card, so I’m not concerned about space at this time.
The three-cell battery is supposed to offer approximately three hours’ life, and that seems to be pretty much accurate. I use the device on its lowest (but still easy to see) brightness setting, which helps with battery life.
The screen, obviously, is small, but I find it functional. I have moved the Windows taskbar to the right-hand side of the screen to maximize the vertical space, and that helps. Figure B shows a screen shot of the device, with my first novel (available for free download from my Web site!) open in Microsoft Word’s Read layout.
.FIGPAIR B screen shot of the Acer Aspire One in action
I spent quite a while at the store typing to see if I’d be comfortable with the keyboard, and despite its small size, I do find it easy to use. My unit had a sticky left-hand arrow when it arrived, but popping off the key and cleaning underneath took care of that. The touchpad works well, although the left "mouse" button makes an annoyingly loud click, so I tend to just tap the touchpad instead.
The built-in webcam takes reasonable (although washed out) pictures. The integrated sound card is decent, and sound through my iPod headphones is clear and rich.
.CALLOUT Thinking of the novel-deletion incident gives me hives.
So, that’s what the Aspire One has to offer. Now, how does it work?
.H1 Using the Aspire One
This is difficult to answer. Ninety-five percent of the time, I am thrilled with the device. The other five, though, involves dropped Internet connections, unbearably slow performance, and a deletion of a full novel’s file that nearly resulted in the netbook (or me) going off my eighth-floor balcony. I’ll discuss each of these below.
Internet access is obviously crucial for a netbook. The Aspire One has a built-in 802.11b/g wireless card and also a LAN port for wired connection. I haven’t tried it wired as the room where I use the device has no cabling, but the wireless connection is strangely inconsistent. I can view a page, hit refresh and have the connection lost, hit refresh again and have it back again. This does not happen on only a specific Web site, nor does it happen all the time, which makes it difficult to trouble-shoot. The dropped connection also happens while checking my Outlook Express email, and the netbook has dropped a connection while sitting right next to my old laptop which keeps its connection throughout.
The odd thing is that the wireless network icon in the task bar never fluctuates, so the unit thinks it’s connected but isn’t. For my purposes, the Internet issues are merely an inconvenience (and, in fact, occasionally a spur to get back to writing and stop playing online) but they should not exist.
The bigger problem is the speed of the device. I was not expecting light-speed from a $300 laptop, but I do expect that when I double-click on "My Computer", something will happen in less than six seconds. Here again, sometimes the device actually delivers seriously fast speed, and then on the next click it’s painfully slow again. I followed several online "speed up Windows XP" guides and the performance is better, but still inconsistent.
Thinking of the novel-deletion incident gives me hives. I was giving my most recent book one last read-through and correction before sending it to literary agents. I’d spent two good hours and made a lot of small changes, none absolutely critical but all making the book just a bit better. I am paranoid about saving my files regularly, so I was saving at the end of each page.
Then I hit Save, and Word announced that it couldn’t save to that location, and shut down. Feeling a little ill, I re-started Word and went to open the file…which was gone. It had been erased.
To make a long and expletive-filled story short, I ate some chocolate to calm myself as advised by my brilliant editor David, and was eventually able to recover the file because a temp file had been left behind. However, I couldn’t bring myself to use the netbook again, too afraid of a repeat of the near-disaster.
That night, and all weekend, my software developer husband ran various macros and tests on the device, and determined that if it saved too quickly into a directory being scanned by the anti-virus software’s real-time scanner, my error happened. With the real-time scanner off, he was able to regularly recreate small "save to a new filename" errors but never my catastrophic one.
Still uncomfortable, I checked Acer’s Web site to look into technical support and possible repair/replacement of the device, largely for the hard drive but also for the sticky key (which at that time I hadn’t attempted to repair) and Internet issues.
I have never been so unimpressed with a company.
.H1 Acer’s troubling reliability and service
My email to support was answered in two days, which I did feel was reasonable. The recommendation was to return the device to Acer for repair. I could do this either by visiting the special Web site set up to facilitate repairs or by calling their tech support number. The form email says, "Currently we are experiencing high call volume, so please expect your hold time to be longer than normal." Concerned by the idea of a default of "longer than normal" hold time, I went to the Web site.
The online form permits the selection of only one issue, and none of the options matched my hard drive problems. I picked the best option I could find and filled out the comment field with the rest of my concerns, then moved on to the next page. The next page consisted of a form for creating a shipping label for sending the device (at my cost) to Acer. While I dithered over this, I received an email listing the information I’d submitted in the earlier form, along with a note stating that the Canadian depot accepted drop-off units. Wanting to avoid the cost of shipping, I decided to find out where this depot was located.
This information is nowhere in the email. It is nowhere on the Web site where I entered the request. It is nowhere on the http://www.acer.ca site. (There is an address there, but it appears to be a main corporate address and not the depot.) At http://www.acer.com, I found a link for service inquiries. Picking Canada, I was met with a page that read "the resource you requested is no more available."
I could have called to find out where the depot was, but at this point I had had enough. I have now disabled the anti-virus real-time scanning and am back to using the netbook, saving each file to multiple places each time I save to reduce the risk of failure. No failures in the last week, which does comfort me somewhat.
[Editor’s note: we, here at ZATZ, are intimately familiar with Acer’s return policy. We own quite a few Acer devices, including monitors and laptops. Every single device we’ve ever bought from Acer has had to be returned for service no less than twice over its life (actually, it’d be more, but the warranty ran out first). In fact, we’re boxing up two more failed 24" monitors that’ll go back to Acer this week (the third repair for each monitor).
Each time, we’ve spent anywhere from $20 to $100 in shipping costs to get the devices to Acer. Once you ship the device, Acer provides no information whatsoever on status, and calls are completely fruitless. Some weeks later, we’ve always gotten the gear back, but once a monitor case was put on incorrectly and another time, the laptop came back behaving exactly as it had when we sent it. Calls to Acer informed us we could send it back in, again, but we’d again have to pay shipping.
We have found that Acer devices are wonderful while they work, but they almost universally fail. That’s not just our experience, but reports we’ve gotten from many other owners. Heather will tell you her conclusion about the Acer Aspire One in a moment, but unless Acer radically improves its reliability and support, Computing Unplugged has to formally recommend not buying Acer products. — DG]
I considered the possibility that the Aspire One is simply being overwhelmed by Microsoft Word 2003 and Norton’s anti-virus software, but the unit comes with trial versions of Office 2007 and McAfee’s Internet security suite. If it can run those, it should be able to handle my older software.
I had been cheerfully telling fellow writers, friends, and family how great the Aspire One was. I now have to temper all of that with, "But if it needs support, you’ll be on your own." As I told people about the problems with the device, nearly everyone mentioned their own problems with previous Acer products and with their lack of support.
Rating the Aspire One is difficult. When it’s working properly, it’s easily a four out of five. When it ate my file, my rating would have been unprintable. My rating for Acer itself is unfortunately not much better. This is my first Acer product, and I suspect it’ll be my last.
.RATING 2
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about the [[http://www.acer.com/aspireone/aspireone_8_9/|Acer Aspire One]].
When you send your Acer in for service (and you will), you’ll start at [[http://support.acer.com|Acer Support]].
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
