🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael Strahl (gmstrahl@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu) wrote:

: With my needs in mind, will the Packard Bell or the Acer prove
: to be reliable.

: I'm looking for the pros and cons on each of these systems and
: any real life experiences dealing with Packard Bell, Acer and
: Best Buy.

I figure I'll toss my hat into this ring.

About Packard Bell:

	Avoid this computer like an Ebola outbreak. Packard Bell's are
mostly sold to people who dont know jack shit, frankly, about computers..

Packard Bell uses a fabrication technique known as "surface mounting".
When Packard Bell has their motherboards manufactured, every tiny 
little component is physically *soldered* to the motherboard -- so
that if in the event you blow a little 15-cent resistor, you have
to send the ENTIRE machine back to the factory. Its like 
getting a flat tire on your car, and having to send the whole 
fucking car back to assembly plant to be fixed. Everything is 
hardwired directly to the board, so its unmodifyable, and unreplacable.
Packard  Bell is also notorious for putting bottom-of-the-barrel hardware 
into their machines. Slow, glitchy, and unpolished. Packard Bell machines 
are bottom-of-the-food-chain computers with NONE of the "gingerbread"
bells and whistles which could easilly and cheaply improve their
machines. For example, Packard Bell machines lack 256K Level-2 caches.
This costs a measly $15-20 to implement, and would increase the speed
of the machine to a HUGE degree. They essentially suck, suck hard, and 
suck in FAR too many ways for me to list out here. The list is nearly 
endless. Stay as far away from Packard Bell as humanly possible.

On a scale of 1 to 100, I would rate Packard Bell as about a 35.


About Acer:

	I personally own an Acer Aspire P/100 Charcoal black minitower.
I love the thing, to be quite honest, as it delivers quite a bang for
the buck. However, it didn't come without a few problems. I purchased
*2* Acer Aspires, and had returned them both, until I finally ended
up with the luck of the draw. Acer, as a company, engages in a
practice known in the industry as "low-balling" their hardware.
Meaning, whatever component is cheapest for that paticular week,
they buy it, and slap it into their machines. So in any lot, you
may have an Aspire with a 1 gig Maxtor, a 1 gig Fujitsu, or a 1
gig Quantum, or whatever. This can be a potential nightmare -- if
the Aspire you purchase comes with a crappy Maxtor drive, you can
expect the machine's hard disk to be LOUD, and eminate a very high
pitched whine.. Both Aspires I purchased had Maxtors, both gave off
a damn high-pitched squeal. I brought both back until I finally
got one with a Fujitsu drive which was 10x as quiet as the Maxtor-
driven machines.. 3 trips to Best Buy later.

	See, if companies like Acer were to just stick with ONE
company to provide their hard drives, it would cost them literally
$1-2 dollars more in difference than if they were to jump from
manufacturer to manufacturer every week. Acer doesn't feel they want
to take that small little step to ensure that ALL of their machines
are of high, and dignified quality, and SPEND that extra 1-2 bucks
on a machine. Wether or not you get a machine with a fast, quiet
hard disk is luck of the draw. Ask to see 3 of the Acers on display,
opened up. When the clerk opens them, make note of what hard drives
are in them. You may also want to check out www.acer.com on the Web.

	Acer, as a company, has improved its image and quality 
dramatically in recent years, as evidenced by past and present
Acer owners. I remember when my brother purchased his Acer Acros 486/33
about 2 years ago -- The manual which came with it was printed in
Korean / Chicken English with loveable phrases like "Mate the man
plug into the female and then system reboot." .. To make matters
worse, the manual itself was missing about 10 pages, and had duplicate
pages in its place. A real crap-job, even for 1993.

	The Acer Aspire I purchased was extremely nice, in terms of
documentation, software, presentation, and other areas. All the system
manuals and CD's are beautifully boxed, all the manuals are bound and
clearly written/illustrated in *normal* English. The system manual
is general enough to inform basic users, as well as detailed enough
for seasoned veterans like myself. When I want to upgrade the video
RAM in my Aspire, I want to know *EXACTLY* what type of RAM it takes.
And the Manual tells you so. Theres a whole section for newbies, and
a big tech section for all the $6/hr rent-a-geek technies, too.


The Aspire is a heavilly integrated package. Everything is meant 
to work with everything else. All the plugs are LABELLED! :) Setting it 
up, and getting up and running is an absolute dream, luckilly. All the 
wires and plugs are colored to match their appropriate sockets, so you'de 
pretty much have to be color blind AND pathetically stupid to screw 
anything up. I was up and running within 5 minutes of unpacking the
system.

The real kicker about Aspire's is the first time you boot one up
after getting it out of the box. You're greeted by a full-motion animation
of an Acer representative who greets you, thanks you for buying their
product, and helps you get started. Its VERY professionally done,
very sleek.

I've found my Aspire to be extremely responsive, agile, and configurable.
I've never run into any of the configuration problems listed by earlier
respondees.

I know 3 people who also have Acer Aspire's .. all 3 love em. And
lets face it, they look great; but you'll pay a little extra for
that "look" ... The hardware under the hood is essentially worth
$1000-1100..So you're essentially paying about $500-600 for a great
case and nice software & manuals.

Also, of a really minor note, is that the case can sometimes be difficult
to correctly re-position after removing it. Theres a slight technique
to it. :)

	For some reason, Acer hides the fact that they DO have alot
of the nice bells and whistles under the hood. The Aspire comes with
a 256K L2 cache, pipeline burst cache, PnP BIOS, Energy-Saving stuff,
all the niceties which are common among excellent systems. For example..
You can tell the monitor to fall back to a "low power mode" after
X minutes of inactivity, and tell the hard drive to spin down after
X minutes of activity. Really nice gear.

	I did a huge amount of research and homework when I bought
my computer, (about 2 months ago) ...balancing what I wanted out of
the machine, and how I wanted it to be. I ended up debating between
getting a Dell Dimension P100t and the Acer Aspire P/100 Tower I
currently own.

On a scale of 1 to 100, I would rate the Aspire as an 89..Not a
god-like machine for its class, but a damn good one.

Hope this helps,
Bowie J. Poag