Acer laptops: better now or still crap?

True but to be fair so do many other higher quality manufacturers. The majority of Apple Macbooks use Hitachi drives, too. That is up until the Retina models at least.

I like them personally and wouldn't hesitate to pick one up again if I was after something cheap. I'd choose them over Samsung (2 of which I've owned before and they feel much less well built) or eMachines. All of the Acer's that I know of are still running besides the hard drive issue mentioned above and 2 of them are approaching 7 years old.

They may cut corners but that's how they are cheaper. They don't statistically have to have any higher failure rate than HP or Gateway laptops either according to this http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10400447-1.html

 

I did recommend her the S7 but she says she needs a DVD drive to load her old backups, and besides its a bit expensive (she wants something for $700 or less).

So ultrabooks are pretty much out

 

BTW what about Samsung laptops? I seen a few and all models look alright.

 

Still running a maxed out IBM Thinkpad T43p from 2005 everyday and quite extensively. Not one problem so far.

 

Yeah the problem is that she wants to keep the price down and thinkpads arent cheap

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LENOVO-THIN...66348396?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item1c3613c06c

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet
- 2 GHz Intel Core i7
- 750 GB HDD
- 4 GB DDR3
- Win 7 Pro 64
- Webcam
- WXGA touchscreen

$450 buy it now is great for an ultraportable that's far more functional than almost anything else it's size. The battery life isn't as good on models with an i7, the previous model (X200 Tablet) has a much longer battery life using a Core 2 Duo. Only bottleneck I can think of is integrated graphics.

 

No way I'm buying her a used laptop from ebay, thats a one-way ticket for trouble

 

Better to be safe, although the now 8-year old Thinkpad T43p I mentioned earlier was bought the exact same way. Occasionally companies will liquidate their older equipment on eBay for very fair prices. Since Thinkpad's are clearly a popular target for businesses, it tends to happen a lot with them in particular. Listings with a large inventory of delicately-used stock equipment makes "used from eBay" something to be judged more on a case-by-case basis. (and that's not even considering the amount of used equipment that OEMs resell as "manufacturer refurbished")

Good luck in your search!

 

Terrible idea is that, if you buy from the right place (AS PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED, BUSINESS LIQUIDATORS) you can get business class, like new (they don't leave desks) computers for cheap.

I bought my rack mount server from a liquidator (£22 it cost me) and it showed up not as advertised (not working) so I talked them into a partial refund (50%!) and was able to use the refund cash to buy the caddy and hard drive I needed to get it running perfectly!

 

As someone who has been around computers for years, if I was looking for a PC of any sort I would not buy from HP, Acer or Sony.

 

External drive to load up those backups, transfer them to more reliable media. Throw DVD's in the bin.

Job done.

 

Totally agree, DVDs like all optical storage solutions should be banned from the world...failure rates on these things are extremely high...solid states ftw!

 

Nope - a bit better than CDs/DVDs, but can degrade with time and can't survive high voltage.
The best media if you want to backup important stuff will be quality HDDs (make at least 2 copies on different drives) or (way more expensive but also way more reliable) tapes (LTO etc).

 

Bought an Acer Aspire 5552 or whatever back in 2011. Suits my purposes, only real problems I've had with it were the old terrible HD which I replaced, also I don't dig the mechanical keyboard that came with it.

 

Do you mean you'd prefer a touch based keyboard, like the Surface Touch cover? Or that you don't like the pitch/travel of the keyboard?

 

I've always had some trouble with Acer laptops...try going Asus.