Acer products and support

Question

As a "Retired Cybergeek" who started programming on an IBM 1620 in 1961, I have watched the evolution of technical support systems, and a programmer, and as a social scientist.  Separating access to fundamental engineering support documentation and the "end user" is a fundamental flaw in the way Acer is handling itself.  I own several generations of Acer equipment.  The engineers often find ways to "save money" in puting together pacages for market, but when something wears out or needs to be upgraded, they have been allowed to ignore public requirements and feedback.  Mine includes the following:
1). Be aware that Acer puts middle or low end reliability hard drives in its' consumer grade equipment.
2). If you are "technical" and want to "hack" things, you will not get support from Acer.

Answer 1

"T"  I'm completely "with you" and did not mean to disparriage Acer for engineering a reasonably well designed product line.  I own 4 going back to a "clone motherboard" Portable with a really early graphics chipset that I've worn out and replaced batteries in, and used for 10 or more years.   It came with Windows XP installed, and still has it.  My observation was based on my own experience.  Out of four Acer computers, the two failures I've experienced were both 4+ year service life issues on their hard drives.  My oldest Acer desktop now hosts a 10,000 RPM "gamer" drive quite a bit bigger that the one that came with it, but everything else is original.  It runs Vista.  My next oldest is the Z3731 desktop that just puked its' drive when I tried a smple RAM upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, the maximum for the motherboard on that system.  It came with a very buggy "first release" Windows 7(X64) Home Premium build.  When I went to set it up, the process took three days because MSIE was so buggy it could not even get its act together to properly invoke the Windows Update functions.  Within a few hours of connecting it successfully to my network, It downloded and applied almost 100 patches!  In the early Win7(x64) world, Microsoft hid a lot of sins in the 32 bit mode rather than exploiting the Intel 64bit archetecture correctly.  I'm still not sure, because of lack of feedback, whether or not to point my finger at software or hardware as the culprit when it comes to my memory upgrade issues.  I believed that 2 2gb chips I bought from Crucial that were the first ones I tried, were the correct chips, but may have "trashed" the old WD drive inadvetently by "bouncing it around" a little bit during the process of opening the snap apart plastic case the first couple of times.  The tabs on the case are now wearing out and two have chipped off, and I'm still not sure what is preventing my system from coming up with 8gb of useable ram.  The "it just sits there" problem with any chips other than the originals, two different pairs of 4gb "supposed to be the right chips" purchased, and no joy.  I'm not willing to go out and buy more RAM now without precise information.  I have to take the system I'm using to write this apart to get it, and that has been a source of my irritation with Acer and changes in the culture since the days when I built a "Thompson Big Board" Z80 system I had to "hop up" by rewiting the timing loop for the RAM in Z80 assembler and blowing the changes into an EPROM before desoldering all 64K of the RAM and soldering in a new bank of faster RAM that cost me more that some of my much more recent computer purchases.  That system "answered the phone" years ago running a CP/M based BBS I called "The Dog House" that was a hobby project of mine.   It was one of the first in my state that connected at 300 baud (Big Grin)