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Re: [LUG] dont buy a laptop just yet....

 

On 15/06/11 18:15, Martin Gautier wrote:
> 
> Acer's are notorious for breaking down. In my experience, almost all the
> consumer laptops I repair are Acer. Invariably the power jack has broken
> or burnt out, the GPU has fried or (at least) one of the caps on the
> mobo have blown.
> 
> A quick query on my CMS tells me just under 68% of the laptops I
> repaired in the last 12 months have been Acer.

There is a huge Acer repair place in Plympton which will do out of
warranty repairs for a good price, and remarkable turn around.

Sorry to publicise Martin's competitors, but we are clearly well served
for getting Acer laptops repaired locally.

Have to say Martin needs to tell us what the proportion of laptops in
circulation (after warranty expires) to know if 68% is good or bad. My
Acer did go for repair, but only after a major drop, don't think we can
blame that one on build quality (unless "case not made from titanium
alloy" is a fault). Possibly also it may denote that other manufacturers
are more successful at attracting out of warranty repairs, or people
throw other laptops away more willingly.

My bigger concern would be they had poor GNU/Linux support. On mine the
graphics card needed some obscure acceleration option disabled, the ACPI
needed to be disabled, nothing major, but not IBM, oops sorry I mean
Lenovo, style GNU/Linux support. So it worked well, but these days you
want proper support for such things so it can keep power usage down (and
battery life up) when it isn't really needed.

That said colleague at work just got a lovely Lenovo laptop, and the
price was pretty good (although that is with some sort of convoluted
cash back scheme).

 Simon

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