My first, and only other laptop, was an Acer. It was a great machine and carried my business for 4+ years without any issues! So, I decided, again, to trust the company which had provide such a valuable machine to me my first time out and bought an ACER Aspire 7745G.

From a technical standpoint this machine should suit the average user without any problems, plenty of RAM, Hard drive spave, Video Ram, … Here are the basic specs:

• i5-430M processor, 2.26Ghz
• 8Gb RAM
• 1000Gb Hard Drive
• 1Gb Radeon Video Card
• 17.3″ Monitor
• Blue-Ray DVD
• …

Sadly, however, I have not been enjoying this laptop as I did my original one! Here are the Pros and Cons:

 

Pros

• It run very quite
• It has a beautiful, large screen
• Pleanty of USB ports
• HDMI port
• Blue-Ray Drive (for the entertainment buffs out there)
• BlueTooth

 

Cons

• I have continuous Wireless network issues, where it will drop a connection and then not allow the laptop to reconnect. The only solution being to reboot the computer completly. UPDATE 2013-03-28 -> See a possible solution in my post entitled Acer 7745G Wireless Network Dropping or Not Finding Any Wireless Network Connections
• I have an issue with extending my display to a secondary monitor and it not always recognizing the secondary monitor. Sometimes it does, and other times it doesn’t
• Sadly Window 7 does not have drivers for my printer. Microsoft blames the Printer manufacturer, but it is Microsoft that developed a new OS and didn’t ensure existing driver could/would work. Anyways,…, one way or another, I have to go dish out more money to buy a new printer if I plan on ever printing from the machine.
• I also haven’t been overly impressed with the i5’s turbo boost technology. It seems to create lag time between choosing to execute something and the computer responding…
• The hard drive response seems slow. I double-click on a folder and you can actually wait for the listing to appear. Heck, my 4-5+ yr old laptop is more responsive than this brand new one?!
• I find the power cord plug difficult to insert into the receptacle on the laptop. My old laptop was a breeze, this one is actually difficult. If your angle isn’t just right, well…
• Because the finish is a nice glossy finish, it show every single finger mark!
• Whereas you used to (my previous Aspire) press Fn+F3 to activate/deactivate the wireless connection, it now simply brings up a pop-up menu to allow you to activate/deactivate the wireless and the bluetooth. So in fact, where Acer had added an extra step requiring you to use the mouse and click everytime you want to activate or deactivate either of your wireless features. What is worse is that they have no excuse, there are plenty of empty Fx keys, that they could have easily assign a seperate button for both the Wireless network and the bluetooth. It may not seem like much, but trust me the more you use it, the more frustrating it becomes!
• Screen brightness fast keys do not work. You can use the fast keys to lower the brightness, but the fast key to increase the brightness does not work? Have fun finding the windows menu to allow you to restore your brightness (Control Panel -> Display -> Adjust Brightness [Top right-hand] -> Screen Brightness [bottom]).
• It comes with Windows7. Nothing else need be said!
• Technical Support -> I finally broke down and called technical support in the hopes of resolving my wireless problem, what a mistake! I spent more time repeating myself than actually fixing anything. Then the support agent sent me to a gateway help page, which by the way did not resolve the problem and he proceeded to terminate the conversation as fast as he could never actually ensuring the problem was fixed in any manner. He was more interested in his call metrics (no call should exceed 2 mins. -> this is factual knowing people having worked as support agents) than actually solving the problem.
  • Why can’t we get proper technical support anymore?
  • Why can’t we get North American Support anymore, rather than dealing with someone half way around the world that obviously does not fully grasp the English language?
  • Most importantly, why is Acer shipping out laptops that have glaring problems!?
• Another oddity is the fact that if you turn off the wireless adapter or the bluetooth, and reboot, the laptop seems to always reset the connection and turn it back on. So everytime you reboot, you need to reset the parameters again, and again, and again, ….?

It just seems to be off a bit and not what I’d come to expect from ACER. I can’t quite put my hand on it exactly. All I know is next time round, I will be broadening my search outside the ACER realm when shopping for a new laptop.

Very Disappointed!

If I were grading this laptop it would get a 3.5 out of 10, because of the various problems. If it actually worked as advertised it would be more like a 8 out of 10. But the reality of the situation make it a dud and a bad purchase!