Maybe I’ll switch tactics and spend less time listening to “professional” reviewers, and more time looking at the worst reviews on Amazon for any given product.

Glad I did that! This $350 Acer laptop that all these reviewers liked and gave Editor’s Choice for a budget laptop, 25% of the Amazon reviewers said was complete junk. Missing pixels on screens, lines through screens, motherboards that die, hard drives that die shortly after purchase, it went on and on. 2,900 reviewers and 25% were giving 1 star reviews.

The only thing this laptop is supposed to do, is be a “reliable backup” for my Mom when her main computer has trouble. Well, that certainly didn’t make the grade.

My main focus is how does the keyboard feel for me..I have RSI so ergonomics & comfort is big..
The how it feels overall how it is put together..solid or flimsy hinges/latches. that sort of thing..

I found some reviewers who do go over those kinds of details, especially the measured brightness and quality of the screen output. Gotta protect my Mom’s eyes. Where I feel let down, is these reviewers don’t seem to deal with or address the numerous problems that people report with various products after they get them. Well I guess that’s Amazon’s job nowadays, for better or for worse.

Acer isn’t an unknown brand. I’m disappointed to find out their build quality is shoddy, but not entirely surprised. I didn’t historically remember them to be “best of breed”. Next up on the chopping block will be Asus. Got a very good monitor for my Mom from them, but don’t know if their laptops are similarly good. Also upping the provisional budget to $500, as I suspect $350 simply won’t buy a reliable laptop.

My Dad and I just had a totally bonehead / useless experience with Dell warranty support, for a wifi adapter in a 1 year old desktop. The tech displayed gross incompetence, telling us to install a Bluetooth driver instead of a wifi driver. That might have been forgiveable as a slip of the typing finger, but he didn’t get back to us for another 12 days either. In that time I arrived, and as an uber-techie, eventually found his mistake. And, applying the wifi driver didn’t solve the problem anyways. Dad sent a letter about how pissed off he was, had bought 4 previous Dell systems, wanted reimbursement for the external Netgear adapter we went and bought to finally solve the problem. Dell blew him off, with the typical polite “we value you as a customer” language. So Dad’s returning the favor and won’t be buying Dell next time.

I’m certain, BTW, that it was Microsoft’s “Fall Creator’s Update” that blew up Dad’s wifi. Problems started happening in November 6 days after MS pushed that update to Dad’s computer. This is the new normal: MS breaking people’s computers with their updates. They broke the graphics drivers on 1 of my 2 old laptops, but I tech guru’d my way out of it. I had to learn black magic to suppress specific driver updates to put it right, and they still overrode it later on. Fortunately it happened to work the 2nd time around, after I re-did the fixes.

I suspect that they broke my Mom’s computer somehow, with the inability to turn it back on again, very slow startup times, etc. It sounded like an overheating problem. I’m not sure exactly what they did, or what I did to fix the problem. I uninstalled a lot of startup apps, and disabled various MS startup services. MS causes pain to consumers, then quietly covers their tracks a few months later. I have the “Pro” versions so I can delay the updates for 4 months, but eventually they hit my machines too.

My Linux experience is extensive and hasn’t added up to “inflict it on my Mom”. I don’t consider it to be a consumer’s OS. Even if everything actually worked, which is a situation I often doubt, when the underlying system is “rather different” and geared towards a techie, that’s not a good fit for a non-techie like my Mom in my opinion. She’s impatient with mechanical devices by nature and doesn’t even give Windows enough time to actually work. Sometimes I come in the room when she’s hollering and there’s no actual problem, it clears up in another 30 seconds. Or she was “chopping at it” and if she just took a deep breath, she would have been fine.

My Dad on the other hand, he’s a fairly technical Photoshop user, but he’s not remotely as technical as I am. He was laboring under the false belief that the Bluetooth driver package included a wifi driver rolled up in there somewhere. AFAICT there was no actual basis for this belief; yes a vendor could do it that way, but there were 2 different drivers on the site with different release notes and driver versions if you drilled down into the details. I don’t blame him, he’s supposed to have support from Dell and they’re supposed to know what they’re doing. Gross incompetence on their part didn’t occur to him.

Whereas in my case, everyone is assumed to be grossly incompetent until proven otherwise. I assume people didn’t plug computers into walls, I go over everything from the most very basic and work forwards. Which is how I find out about other people’s actual gross incompetence. I must say I was still pretty pissed, I didn’t think Dell had slid as a company that far.