Acer or Toshiba?

• Acer or Toshiba? - Amanda
  • toshiba - sadie
  • Go online and put in your make and model..... - read reviews.. nm

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I just bought an Acer notebook from Walmart.  Anyone have experience with this they can share?

I know they are not much good for transcribing (too small), but I also go to college and seeing as they only weigh 1 pound, I thought it might be good to have.

Do you think I wasted my money?  Should I have spent the extra $200 and got a real laptop?

A netbook/notebook is made to check email, surf the net, do light transcribing.  It should perform as well as a larger laptop and has a better battery life than a laptop (4-6h compared to 2-2.5h).   You can check Consumer Reports or PC World to find out how well each brand performs.  Acer is a nice unit, plus it has XP.  Buy a full-size laptop and you get Vista.

As far as buying electronics from Wal-Mart, I buy all my PCs, cameras, etc., from there and have never had a problem with any of them.  The PCs are the same as the ones in Staples, BestBuy, etc., just a $100 or more less.  They also offer a service contract like the high-priced stores.  No, I don't work there.

A friend's daughter bought one for college and was never able to connect to the internet.  Unfortunately, she waited past the time to return it before bringing it to me as I would have told her to return it.  We could get her microsoft update to work, but nothing else.  I tried for days to get through to their tech support, which was horrendous. 

First you have to send an email explaining the situation and what you have done to fix it.  They will then email you back with solutions and a number to call if it doesn't work.  You have 7 days from the date of the email to take care of it. I called the number as everything they suggested had either been done or just did not work.  Call was answered by someone in India of course, who could not fix the problem and needed to escalate the service.  You then get transferred.  Once transferred, the system automatically hangs up after 27 minutes.  I was never able to get through to anyone no matter what I did.  I called daily, several different times of the day, explaining that I was being disconnected, etc, to no avail.

She is going to take it to a computer repair shop locally to see if anything can be done, but after paying $500 for a laptop, why should she be paying for service on a new machine? 

My son was just telling me last week that he was thinking of a laptop for college and mentioned the Acer and I told him to stay far away from it explaining what happened to our friend.  I personally have had a Toshiba for almost 8 years (the same one!) and just love it.  I am getting ready to buy a new one and will definitely choose Toshiba again.

HP has been the best, but brand isn't that important. I wouldn't get a Gateway and  I wouldn't get a Celeron processor.   My Dell didn't have the speed that the HP you linked does and I was able to work fine, but I would definitely agree to get faster.   I download and then work off-line.  If you worked on-line you would definitely want/need faster. 

I am using a Toshiba Satellite and it has a lot more RAM, a  much faster processor, and a 17'' screen and I paid less than the HP you linked. 

Dell is a piece of *rap.  I've had to replace every major piece, fortunately the majority was when it was still under warranty.   I've had an HP for 5 or 6 years and other than a hard drive crashing it has been a very good computer.   My Toshiba is the newest, just a year old, and I don't like it near as much as my HP and I'm probably going to switch back to my HP as my main computer.

I don't know about Acer laptops, but we had a desktop and we had so many problems with it, we got an HP computer under the lemon law in exchange for the Acer. 

I would recommend getting an extended warranty on whatever you get.   Check to see if you can get your computer serviced locally if it is still under warranty or if you need to ship it off somewhere.  Dell's customer service is in India, don't know about other companies.  When I dealt with HP they were not offshore and I haven't had to deal with Toshiba yet. 

It's been well over a year now...  Towers are a different story, but I've had pretty good luck with e-machines from Best Buy.

that also has the number pad on the side and the keys are enough out of position that the times I have used the keyboard I backspace half of what I type. 

I use an external keyboard the majority of the time. 

and an HP desk top.  The Dell is a piece of junk and I'm fixing to piece it out.  I haven't had any problems with the Toshiba but I still prefer my HP and if I were to get a new computer it would be HP. 

The cheaper computers of any brand tend to have Celeron processors and they are really a cheap processer and I personally wouldn't buy one, but otherwise there is nothing wrong with the computers, they just don't have all the bells and whistles.  If they last 2 years you've gotten your money out of them and they have become practically dinosaurs by then anyway.