I have just received confirmation that ACER have agreed to compensate my laptop reseller. As a consequence I will be refunded also. This is over a laptop I bought (ACER 1600 series P4 2.6 512 ram 64MB ATI 9000) 6 months ago which they were unable to fix due to a generalised hardware limitation, preventing the machine from running as advertised for longer than a few minutes.
It is worth pointing out that this hardware limitation may not just be specific to the 1600 series - the test used to diagnose the problem also showed up another machine in their test lab. Most people doing basic tasks such as word processing may not notice the issue, but anyone trying to take advantage of high end specifications (such as graphics processing) of these models will notice a significant performance decrease after a few minutes.
I really really advise people not to buy an ACER laptop. I suspect that ACER are knowingly selling machines without proper thermal management in the hope that the majority of users will not notice the performance dive. This situation occurrs without any software power management functions whatsoever - it is a limitation of the Mobo.
Be advised.
It is worth pointing out that this hardware limitation may not just be specific to the 1600 series - the test used to diagnose the problem also showed up another machine in their test lab. Most people doing basic tasks such as word processing may not notice the issue, but anyone trying to take advantage of high end specifications (such as graphics processing) of these models will notice a significant performance decrease after a few minutes.
I really really advise people not to buy an ACER laptop. I suspect that ACER are knowingly selling machines without proper thermal management in the hope that the majority of users will not notice the performance dive. This situation occurrs without any software power management functions whatsoever - it is a limitation of the Mobo.
Be advised.
