Brian is an Acer devotee, but says his girlfriend has been stung by a particular netbook model that freezes up on her no matter how many times they exchange it for a new one.

Here’s a portion of the email he sent to Acer customer service:

I am contacting you concerning a netbook that I just received back from your repair center today. I have had it an hour and will be sending back to your repair center for the 3rd time now. This particular netbook keeps randomly freezing.

I purchased this netbook for my girlfriend, she needed a portable and reliable pc for her classes. I have 3 Acer computers and have never had an issue with any of them. We found this netbook on sale for 279.99 at OfficeMax.com and decided to purchase it. She began to complain about it freezing up, I thought perhaps it was overheating so we purchased a USB powered laptop cooler but that didn’t help. I reloaded the operating system using the restore partition and when that didn’t resolve the issue I went out and bought Windows 7 Home premium, formatted the hard drive (but not the recovery partition) and loaded it on the netbook. That still didn’t resolve the freezing issue.

We called Acer support and I explained the issue to the tech, she asked what operating system was on the pc currently. When I told her Windows 7 I was told that loading that operating system voided the warranty. This was shocking to me and I asked to speak to a supervisor. I was transferred to a supervisor where I explained the situation and she agreed to send the netbook in for RMA warranty work. We sent the netbook in and received it back about 2 weeks later with a letter that said the only repair work they did was a bios update. It froze up on her later that day. Being that her semester started I told her to use it for now and after her classes were completed we will send it back in again. She used it to take her final exam for that class and it froze in the middle of the test. She had to email her teacher and explain her pc issues and was allowed to retake the exam.

I did some research online on this model computer (AO751H-1401) and have read several posts regarding the same freezing issue. The ones who had resolved the issue either replaced the memory in the unit or had to have the entire motherboard replaced. I saved the links and even printed out one to reference when I called back in early December to get another RMA for this unit. I explained the entire situation to the new tech and was referencing the different websites I found that may help to resolve the issue and was told they do not speculate off internet rumors but did say he believed it to be a hardware issue since the operating system had been reloaded multiple times and that hadn’t resolved anything.

What brands of laptops and netbooks have you had the worst experiences with? Which have you found to be the most reliable?

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