Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi review

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5.4

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Average user rating from 5 users

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Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi user reviews

February 28, 2006

Posted by: Anonymous

"Many problems backed by terrible CUSTOMER SERVICE"

What I like:

Machine seemed good on paper and early reviews were promising but many superficial

What I don't like:

Cannot get a clean boot after three weeks of trying, sending the machine to ACER, and spending 20 hours with tech support (including hold time)

Review:

After a lot of research, I bought the ACER 8204 WLMi to replace my Dell Latitude 810. On paper it looks great and the early online reviews were very positive. To start with a summary - BUYING THIS MACHINE WAS A MISTAKE.
The machine would not boot cleanly out of the box. It booted, but the event viewer showed errors mainly to do with LAN adapters and something called gsensor. Calls to ACER support resulted in very long hold times and support staff who were next to useless. No one knew about the gsensor error (I subsequently found out it had to do with ACER's Gravisense that helps to secure the hard drive in the event the unit is dropped.) Machine was also formatted to three FAT32 drives which I immediately wanted to change to NTFS since we are a Windows shop and run NTFS everywhere.
Using CONVERT.EXE it was a simple matter to convert the drives to NTFS but ACER kept blaming the problems on this so we did a complete reinstall back to factory restore and FAT32. None of this fixed the problem. The other problem was that although the wireless LAN seemed to work OK, the machine worked very erratically on a wired LAN. This was very strange, you could connect to the Internet but sites would load either very slowly or not at all. After about another 10 hours with tech support, I shipped my new laptop back to ACER for a week to be fixed.