Asylum-ET™

Just yesterday I bought an Acer Aspire One, Model number D250-1371 for my daughter as a birthday present. I bought it mainly because the specs matched those of the laptop she has been using hapily up until the screen burned out. So I took it out of the package to have a look over it before giving it to her so I could make sure everything worked as it should.

At first I was excited because everything seemed to be working just fine. I then copied a few MP3 files to the Music folder and proceeded to play them in the included windows media player that comes bundled with Windows 7. After playing about half of the song the playback stopped and then started again after about half a seconds time. This persisted on every MP3 I tried to play. No specific intervals or anything like that so it is a totally intermittent issue.

This is the type of thing I would expect to happen if I had been over loading the computer by opening tons of intensive applications all at once while trying to listen to music but this is far from the case. There are no other programs running except those required by the OS and the computer itself.

I figured this must just be a driver issue or something to that effect so I decided I would later reinstall from the D2D feature provided and I moved on. I then decided to change the background image on the desktop known to us all as “wallpaper”. This proved to be something that is not allowed by the OS.

I call tech support who BTW is outsourced to people who can barely speak english. They send me to another support number who was an english speaker but he tells me that the first people I spoke to should have helped me and they have been sending people over to them all day that they should not have. He also told me that they have been getting a large volume of calls in regard to their computers that Walmart distributes for them.

I was then refered back to the original number. The next technician told me that I bought the netbook version so I am not capable of changing my desktop wallpaper unless I chose to upgrade for a minimum of $80.00 or more depending on what features I want. This computer comes with Windows 7 Starter. Microsoft opted to try forcing users to upgrade for yet more money just so we the users can access the most basic of functionality that is available in “all” previous graphically based operating systems and then companies like Acer decided to be just as cheap and use bogus crippleware in their hardware.

I then told the support tech that I was begining to think I should just bring the thing back because it is an joke all around but the one thing that would change my mind and make me keep the Acer Aspire One would be if I could just install an operating system that is actually all there without voiding my warranty and you guessed it, this is not an option.

After this I will never buy another peice of technology from Walmart nor will I ever buy an Acer. It should also go without saying that Microsoft can scratch me off their user list as well. The Acer Aspire would be a great little unit if they did not lock you into using a crippled OS. That is just bad marketing and I hope the rest of the people buying this garbage see this and stop supporting them.