Acer AcerPower Sx

...Background on the series.
Acer have been around in some shape or form since 1976. They have been producing Desktop PC for about 10 years.
They offer a variety of ranges of PC to the consumer and the Power range is supposed to be cutting edge performance at a discounted rate. Well let me tell you. Its not.
The Power series my mum bought is the SX. It comes with a Pentium 3 866 Mhz Processors which even at the time, was not the ...
...best memory capacity around.
Acer do provide their own make of motherboard which can prove trouble.
All of this comes in a universal case with an Acer badge on it. Very unprofessional looking.
The monitor is also badged as an Acer but I feel it is not produced by them. It is however 17 inch which is again the market standard today.

My mum bought her Acer Power about a year ago.
It was on special offer at ... more

My first ever PC that I bought myself was made by Acer. At the time, they were operating as the cheap brand pc's on sale at PC World.
They seemed to be vastly undercutting the competition although their specifications were not as high.
After months of faultless operation, It started to go wrong. This is when your problems all start with Acer.
Looks like times have not changed as I will tell you about their POWER range of modern PC's.

Background on the series.
Acer have been around in some shape or form since 1976. They have been producing Desktop PC for about 10 years.
They offer a variety of ranges of PC to the consumer and the Power range is supposed to be cutting edge performance at a discounted rate. Well let me tell you. Its not.
The Power series my mum bought is the SX. It comes with a Pentium 3 866 Mhz Processors which even at the time, was not the fastest. A 10Gb Seagate Medallist Hard drive which is not the largest or even the market average at the time.
With only 64Mb of RAM on the motherboard it did not have the best memory capacity around.
Acer do provide their own make of motherboard which can prove trouble.
All of this comes in a universal case with an Acer badge on it. Very unprofessional looking.
The monitor is also badged as an Acer but I feel it is not produced by them. It is however 17 inch which is again the market standard today.

My mum bought her Acer Power about a year ago.
It was on special offer at Dixons. At £799 with a monitor is seen as a good deal. I had bought a non badged PC with similar specs for £200 cheaper than this but without the screen.
We felt that with an offer of 3 year warranty and a 1 year on site warranty, Acer would be covered for all eventualities.

After a couple of months, the computer started to lock up and report errors during the boot sequence.
I range their helpline which is very difficult to use and a typical "press 1 for service, Press 2 for Parts" type line. After about 5 minutes of holding and waiting, I finally got to speak to someone. They said they would send an engineer out as we were still under on site warranty. It took 4 days to get someone out. Dell have someone out to you in hours! Very dissapointing.
After a lot of ers and ums, he decided to replace the motherboard. So 3 months old and a new motherboard needed. Not a good advert for their POWER system!
This worked for about another 2 months and again the same problem occured. Another engineer came out and I this time, sat with them and explained the problem. I said there must be another cause to make the motherboard fail.
They took it away for some testing and altogether it was gone for 5 weeks!
The problem? A faulty power supply that was causing surges to damage components on the motherboard. Since then it has come back and worked fine.

This however is a good example of a company who buy in external components for their PC builds. They do not know the standard of component and obviously, this leads to a poor quality control and many problems. If I had not told them to test it, my mum would still be going through motherboards every couple of months and probably having to pay for them now.

Its normally a good idea to buy yourself a good quality system if you intend to be a high percentage user. You don't want to worry yourself with having to get it fixed every few months. Its time consuming and expensive.

Acer seem to disregard these requirements with their systems. Although they look nice and behave at the beginning, they soon decide to go wrong. The same thing happened to my computer but with a different fault. I think this is a totally unreliable make and not so reasonably priced as they used to be to make them attractive to budget buyers.

A thumbs down from me. 

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