Cheap Laptop

Having lost my ibook to a blown mother board before my move to England I was in the market for a new computer, but with limited budget an apple wasn't in the short term plan. To the rescue came Tesco and Acer, with a sub £400 laptop to allow me to make contact with the web and do my work.

Enid and Small had both got the same laptop and had mixed results, with Small's going bung soon after purchase. The 12 month exchange or refund deal at Tescos sorted that out for her, but the day after I bough mine I experienced the a similar problem.

I used the laptop for about 6 hours on Saturday night after purchase and shut it down. On Sunday morning the computer would not turn on - pressing the on/off switch causes the power indicator LED to shine green for a few seconds then it goes out. There is no sound of either hard drive or fan operating and no screen activity. The battery indicate is green throughout. The on off switch does not light up at all. It had to go to Acer, when it came back things worked fine.

It runs Vista premium home edition which does what you need of an operating system. All the security messages were a hassle but they eventually went away due to vista upgrades I belive.

As it is wi-fi enabled connecting to the internet is easy, and the built in webcam was quite good... untill it stopped working. The camera does not show up in the control panel device manager list, as there is no branch for Imaging Devices at all. Following a suggestion online I downloaded Microsoft Amcap to test the camera but it fails telling me I have no video capture hardware. As my laptop had only just arrived back from the service centre for another issue I gave up on getting it work. There are suggestions for fixes care of the Acer guy but none have work for me.

Acer include a whole lot of software which tries to be an operating system over the top of vista, slowing the computer down for no good reason, so I deleted most of them.

All in all the lap top does what I need at a bargain price, but two out of three of the Aspire 3680 laptops this family bought had a major fault within the first month of use, which isn't a good hit rate, so buyer beware, you get what you pay for.