April 25, 2008: Acer is crap
I must apologize for not updating in many days. The only excuse I can think of is that my laptop is a complete joke and never works properly. Here is a picture of my Acer on a typical day.
Ignoring the childish warning screen for a moment, take one look at that keyboard. In their lunacy, Acer decided to include two separate euro keys, one of which is somehow crammed into the 5 key. How the hell do you even access that? I tried every possible combination of alt/shift/Fn/ctrl keys, and then I tried slamming my fist onto the 5 key as hard as I could, but nothing happened. I now believe it’s not a “5/euro” key at all, but a “5 euro” key—useful for when you need to express that something costs 5 euros. That’s probably the average hourly wage of the morons working at Acer.
What’s interesting about the euro key over by the arrows is that it’s literally not mapped to anything, and neither is the nearby dollar key. Basically I have two euro keys and neither of them work. I guess I have to map them myself? I probably should have built the entire laptop myself.
The first thing that went was the Acer’s ability to sleep and hibernate. It has to be awake at all times or else it freezes, like some sort of reverse bear. You can close the lid without powering down, but it’s not a smart idea because you’ll just crash the system. My laptop was not designed for such taxing activities as closing the lid. These early warning signs began to occur prior to the warranty’s expiration, so I guess I could have shipped it off to Acer to be fixed. But I didn’t really want to be without my laptop for 2 months while they wiped out my hard drive, and furthermore I didn’t exactly trust the same geniuses who designed my laptop to fix it. Also, I naively assumed that some of my issues might have been software related.
After my warranty expired this past February, that was my laptop’s cue to really begin falling apart in earnest. Increasingly it stopped booting successfully. What it usually does after you power it on is it emits three piercing beeps and then you’re treated to the douche chill screen shown in the above photo. One of my favorite hobbies is to browse the internet for a solution to this problem, but the consensus seems to be that it’s due to a faulty mainboard. A good temporary solution I’ve found is that when the laptop starts beeping at me, I beat the shit out of it and try to restart. After much experience in hitting my laptop, experimentally varying the intensity and placement of my wallops, I’ve determined that if I apply steady pressure to the area just to the left of the touchpad, it will actually boot up with no problems. The only problem is that I usually have to continue to exert this pressure throughout my laptop use, or else the system will lock up or I’ll lose my wireless signal. Sometimes I actually have to operate my laptop with a dictionary balanced on the left side, which is not exactly the portable solution I envisioned when I purchased my laptop.
Of course, my Acer isn’t really a laptop anymore. The mere idea of placing this device on my lap is cause for laugher. I’m well aware that any subtle movement of my legs would create far too much commotion for my machine’s brittle constitution. In general, physically moving my laptop in any way once it has successfully powered on is asking for trouble. At best the wireless functionally will be disrupted, and you’ll have to manually reconnect to the network, but most often you’re just going to lock up the machine—and it serves you right for attempting to adjust the position of your laptop. Laptops were not designed to be carelessly placed on top of your lap.
I’ve opened my machine up numerous times to make sure everything was cleaned and properly in place, but to be honest I don’t know the purpose of most of that circuitry anymore than the retards over at Acer. Eventually I’m going to have to just replace the machine entirely—I haven’t even mentioned the inch-wide band of scrambled lines that occasionally appears on the rightmost side of my monitor. Needless to say, I would never again purchase a computer product made by Asser. They should switch to an industry in which the excel: making hilarious practical jokes.
stoney wrote:
Not to offend you, but how the hell cheap was the sale that influenced you to even BUY an Acer in the first place? You can buy those POS in a bulk pack of 25 for the price of 1 Dell computer… and those aren’t much better!
Posted on 26-Apr-08 at 1:39 am | Permalink
Ueli wrote:
Allegedly, you use the /right/ Alt key in conjunction with the 5 to type a euro. I can’t test this myself, as the left Alt key on my Acer fell off long ago and the right one stopped working when I had to roll back my keyboard driver. So yes, Acer is quite definitely crap.
Posted on 26-Apr-08 at 8:19 am | Permalink
erick wrote:
i love this man.
Posted on 26-Apr-08 at 12:48 pm | Permalink
erika wrote:
awkwardly, i’ve had the same acer laptop for 6 years and its still beautiful. gross eh. never had one problem with it. And I quite like the two Euro keys. Because I frequently like to just type to the Euro symbol, but I hate touching the same key over and over again. PROBLEM SOLVED BY ACER DESPITE BEST EFFORTS TO LOOK LIKE DOUCHES
Posted on 26-Apr-08 at 3:41 pm | Permalink
Margaret Britowski wrote:
Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Hold on a second here. You’re stating that you have a shitty laptop, correct? Well you better hold on to your freaking hat, because I’m about to blow away your acer laptop with the fury of a thousand flames.
1. After about 20-30 minutes my computer over heats and the thing shuts down. This is good if you want to cook a meal while you surf the net, I suppose, but that’s usually not one of my priorities when I’m trying to do my homework. I have to carry what my friends call “frozen-pea life support” with me, which is a part of my infamous laptop care kit. I’ve gotten odd looks from the people who run the local internet cafe when I ask them if they could please put my sack of expired meat in the freezer for an hour or two so I can finish my homework.
2. Should I forget my laptop care kit, battery life lasts about 40 minutes. That doesn’t really matter, though, because if I forgot my laptop care kit than I forgot the frozen ham package that I hold so near and dear, and my laptop will over heat at least 10 minutes before it dies or battery failure.
3. Stains and cracks. Ever since about three years ago, my desktop computer died, my laptop has become the family computer (just as well, I suppose, with the old one having a gig of memory and half a gig of RAM). There are food stains all over my laptop, which wouldn’t be so bad if it was just aesthetic difficulties. With the laptop over heating the food burns and decomposes, causing the spread of biological and chemical warfare in the house. The stains from where wrists rest are dark, and when you turn it upside-down it looks like an happy robot with missing teeth.
4. I’m missing the “L” key and the “Shift” key from my keyboard, crumbs from my mother’s food have gotten lodged under the keys and managed to pry those ones loose.
5. When my dad and mother did up the family budget, apparently an internet connection wasn’t a one of those important things. So I walk around town, trying desperately to grab a signal while freezing my hand off from holding up the ham packet.
People often wonder why I wear UFO parachute pants. It’s because it’s the most viable transportation option for my laptop care kit. It contains:
-Two power cords that occasionally work (my rabbit thought the cords would taste like carrots, I suppose)
-A package of frozen ham or vegetables, or some other form of meat.
-A teddy bear that I clutch in the corner when my laptop fails the second before I save the final draft of my essay with that kick ass conclusion sentence that I can’t remember now.
So, good sir, when the gods of the internet are reading your kick ass website, I will be the one to get a kick ass computer for Christmas. But then again, if they’re internet gods, then I doubt they would read comments, because no one with half a brain reads these things.
Posted on 27-Apr-08 at 10:22 am | Permalink
rc5 wrote:
^ I read all the comments. D=
Jeez Margaret, I thought we were friends.
Posted on 29-Apr-08 at 5:20 pm | Permalink
wickensworth wrote:
Stoney: It wasn’t even that much cheaper. I bought my laptop after about four minutes of research on Newegg.com. I guess I’m the asshole now.
Ueli: Nope, I already tried that 30 times. Maybe that’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t.
Posted on 02-May-08 at 9:31 pm | Permalink
ruaha wrote:
MacBook.
Throw that fuckah down the stairs, and it’ll still generate six-dimensional hypermodels of new molecules, while letting you jack your brain into the pan-neural network of your choice.
“No one with half a brain reads these things.”
I have at least two.
Posted on 17-May-08 at 3:01 pm | Permalink
Alison wrote:
Seriously. MacBook. (or MacBook Pro if you’ve got the €€€). Who has ever regretted getting a Mac? No one.
(And yeah, I know we aren’t european here, but I wanted to show off my euro sign, that while not standard on the keyboard, takes about 2 seconds to insert, even less if I took the time to make a shortcut for it, which is also insanely easy because Macs are made so that even 2-year-olds and people with botched lobotomies have no problems utilizing all of their functions.)
Posted on 19-May-08 at 8:48 am | Permalink
Liam wrote:
You have two €? But no £?
Posted on 25-May-08 at 11:09 am | Permalink
Stephany wrote:
I hate Acer. I have the same exact computer and it sucks.
Posted on 29-May-08 at 10:36 pm | Permalink
kegan wrote:
i have an acer laptop :-< oh btw it ctrl
alt 5
Posted on 25-Jun-08 at 4:31 pm | Permalink
RB wrote:
ROFL - The area just left of the mouse pad is the hard drive! I know what you mean, my Acer is an absolute piece of shit which has crashed after only a few years. They’re basically disposable. You wrote this 3 years ago so I highly doubt (and hope for you) that you still have this pile of junk, but to get that 5 Euro sign to work you press the blue key “Fe” or whatever to the right of control and then the 5. So “Fe”+5. I was very pissed with mine all the time and gave it a good smack on a regular basis. I supposedly got a deal after paying nearly $1200 for it - It lasted less than 3 years!
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 4:13 am | Permalink
RB wrote:
Oops, never mind - I thought it said this was written in 2005. Still hilarious though. Yes I suggest an IBM/Lenovo laptop. They’re expensive yes, but it is worth it. Look on eBay for a good deal!
Posted on 17-Jul-08 at 4:17 am | Permalink
Anonymous wrote:
ACER IS TRUELY CRAP! AFTER SALES SERVICE IS A JOKE AND A HALF
Posted on 26-Aug-08 at 12:01 pm | Permalink
lolasjem wrote:
wow…..so I am not the only luddite on the planet…..bought this laptop because my MAC was worn out and busted and the Acer cost about as much as it was going to cost to fix the old MAC….new battery, new power cord adapter, removing a stuck cd etc. Well I should have known better…..
First off they ripped me off at the Source…closest place to get a laptop and I was desperate….didn’t receive all the goodies as promised, so BAD service from the store. Only part of the rebates came…false advertising! After only having the laptop for about a month I couldn’t get it to power up. It needed about a month vacation before it would work again. Then the trial versions expired which threw the computer into more hissy fits and made it unuseable till it settled down again. Then on May 11th the CD/DVD driver somehow erased itself while I was playing a CD…..not to be found anywhere by a technician…..Like the author of this article, I can’t be with out a computer while they fix it….so I continue to moan and suffer…then there is the problem of the dancing curser…..it randomly jumps all over the screen….or the NO ACTION stuck mode ball…on MAC, the disco ball…..Wordperfect with Vista…hasn’t WP been obsolette since about ‘98? POS to say the least….My new MAC will be coming home soon.
Thanks for the rant and it is good to know that I am not alone with these computer problems.
LJ
Posted on 27-Aug-08 at 1:36 pm | Permalink