2013 Archives

[taminrob]

Just finished checking that...hadn't looked before...not working yet for me either.  I'll do some searching and see what I can come up with...I love a challenge, I'm sure there is a solution out there

[abuafak]

I saw one in Best Buy today - Loved it.

Decided to do a little investigating on it and see if I could upgrade it at all. (SSD etc)

Well, found this string. Read 30 pages.

The Scam is quite clear. 

I wouldn't buy an R7 now if you paid me.

What Rank Dishonesty on the companies part and that of their Shill here, who seems to have vanished. Apparently he has a conscience.

Obviously ALL Units being sold are Bad. ALL. (NJcurveball has it right)

Very few people know what the problem is or find these strings. 

The company just hopes they muddle through and the machines end up in the hands of the incompetent or others whose use is not a problem/close.

They first intimidate/confuse people who call in.

Only the experienced (with BS) get level 2.

What an Outrage. 

Thankfully Acer doesn't make cars!

RECALL is what an Honest company would do; Not suggest people buy and send in for fix! What the hell is that?

What an Outrage, incuding by the vanished shill.

I'll look again when the Next Gen/Haswell comes out, but this company has shown they're unscrupulous.

I spend months in Hotels at long distances from towers, I couldn't tolerate this [word filter avoidance]

`

[bearacuda]

BEWARE!!!

I did as ACER CORY said I PMed him and he had tech support contact me.

Long story short. I recieved my fifth R7 today. I can't believe that it was another broken laptop. As soon as I opened the box I found odd damage to the inside of the box. At first everything appeared to be undamaged. I turned it on and the LCD screen had a cracked. The wired thing was that it appeared to possibly be broken before it was shipped.

Now, to make things worst, Acer had me send pictures to them,  and now they are doing an investigation. They said that their laptops are throughly inspected before they are shiped. If that is the case why did I recieve two broken laptop from them one with a screen that was too dim and ghosted images in the background and one with a display that has a hot spot which they agree needed replaced (besides the countless other poeple who recieved laptops back with the same problems they sent it in with or other problems). I hope that they find out that their repair department is failing them, but I am afraid that they will claim this is something I did (because that is what they implied the investiagtion was about). I am to find out the out come within 24 business hours. I will update this board when I find out their desicion, but I thought that anyone considering a replacement should be aware of this before they attempt. Best of luck to all of us.

Please see post 613 to see full story.

[treadlequeen]

Received my Ebay refurb today.  Someone had mentioned a blue dot; my box had a red dot.  Same wifi issue, same broadcom wifi card. SNID 320.  I am leary about breaking into it.  I have my "techy" son looking into the issues.  I may try a usb adapter to boost the signal and have him replace the card when I see him at Christmas.  That, or I will send it back and wait for the next generation.  Very disappointing.

[adessmith]

I just got an R7 from Best Buy this week. I had to use a company credit card and it was a complete hassle! (that is a whole other story)
Now, I'm finding that the wifi is giving me problems. Here are the things I have found in my troubleshooting process:
1) At my home, with 5ghz wireless N everything works great.
2) At work, we have two older wifi access points... they are 2.4ghz wireless G. The connection here is completely unreliable unless you are right beside the access point and even then it is slow.

3) Purchased a usb ETHERNET adapter and, when plugged directly into the LAN this thing screams (75mbps fiber connection)
4) Purchased a USB nano wireless adapter by edimax. When plugged in directly on either side of the laptop I have the same problem.
5) Disabled the onboard bluetooth and wifi, the usb adapter still cant connect reliably.
6) Using a long USB extension cable with the edimax adapter things work great.

My conclusion at this point is that there is something inside the laptop that is causing interferance on the 2.4ghz spectrum, or specifically just wireless G (I need to test this further because I havent checked wireless N opperating at 2.4ghz)

At this point, it was such a hassle getting the thing I'm not sure what to do. I'm afraid its going to end up being a huge ordeal to try to return this (It's a long story).
I dont like that it sounds like they are sending referbished units to replace these, and people are having issues with the referbs. We spent almost $1,000 after tax, asking us to send to back and give us a reburbished unit is unacceptable! Is that the solution I should expect when I break down and create a support case?

If I can avoid all that and just replace the wireless card myself for less than $50, I would rather go that route.

However, given my troubleshooting steps, I'm not certian that IS a solution... Unless physically removing the existing wireless card gets rid of the RFI that is causing the issue...

Is the guy who replaced his still reading here? Have you tried connecting to a wireless G network, or are you strictly connecting to wireless N? If it is wireless N, was it opperating at 2.4ghz or 5ghz?

[Corrosive]

I keep my eye on this thread just to see what people are saying... I actually really really like mine. Sure there are pages upon pages of people with issues but if you notice, its alot of the same person over and over... maybe end user issues, who knows. There are good ones out there, people are just more prone to complain when they get a bad one...

[taminrob]

I am using 2.4 G and 5 N.  Still have a few wireless devices that dont have N.  So far, I have not had any connection issues since I changed out my card.  The only thing that is now working is Bluetooth...not sure why, but thats it.  I have that same Intel card in my other laptop as well (Samsung ATIV Book 6) and Bluetooth works perfectly.  Wireless connection speed is listed as 400 kbps, though I still havent transfered any files between the two machines.  It really is easy to do and you do not need to get the Intel card that I used...you can order a better model Broadcomm card and it SHOULD fix the issues too without having to install any other drivers (more than likely it will be close enough to the stock card that the factory drivers should cover it...like I said in an earlier post, I just wanted to have the latest and greatest and am upgrading my router soon so I went for that card.

[lynchps]

I can tell you after 3 bad ones, something isn't right!

[alan6101]

When I got the refurb R7 from ebay, I tested it and had good wifi. Then over the next couple of days I noticed that my speed had gotten really bad. I impulsively just orederd a new wifi card, thankfully it hasn't arrived yet. This morning I started running some more tests compared to my macbook pro in the same location. Sure enough, the R7 was only getting about a tenth of the speed of the macbook, maybe even less.

Quick check in device manager showed that I was using a Microsoft supplied driver. I'm going to just assume here that when running windows update I got a little over zealous checking updates and allowed it to install a new wifi driver. So I installed the Broadcom driver from the acer support site and rebooted (I installed the BT and WLAN portions). 

New speedtest.net results are 75 mb/s instead of 5 mb/s with the microsoft driver. I'm not saying a driver update is going to fix everyone's R7, I'm just saying check and make sure you're not running the microsoft driver. It's not very good  Now I guess I can just return the other wifi card I ordered. 

Windows 8.1 update: I had to change my DPI scaling to 100% because the fonts were really blurry. Thankfully even though the R7 has a smaller screen than my 17" macbook pro, the screen is actually closer to me thanks to the keyboard and easel hinge combination.

[adessmith]

Can anyone say for certian that they DID have the problem with the broadcom wifi card, changed it out, and solved the issue?
I am totally willing to do that, if we know for sure it works. So far the only one confirming the intel card works find says he didnt experience any problem before upgrading it... I'm not so sure the broadcom card is the issue, as I installed a nano-USB wifi adapter and it still had issue until using an extension cable to get the adapter away from the computer.

I did take it to my mothers home last night, who is running 2.4 wireless G, and had the same issue.

I just checked at home, and my wireless N running at 2.4ghz OR 5ghz still works fine.
The only time I have the problem is wireless G. I am getting ready to take it out of town and I'll be connecting to wifi at various places, I'm going to try to note if each access point I connect to is a/b/g/ or n... and whether or not I had issues with it. So far every access point I have connected to (about 5) has had the issue except mine at home, and it's the only N network out of those.

I really LOVE LOVE LOVE this laptop, but HATE the wifi issue... I am really torn on whether to take it back or not because I know there is nothing else quite like it.
I also just stumbled upon a little utility that is VERY useful for this laptop as well. It is called TouchMousePointer, by a developer called LoveSummerTrue. In my opinion, acer should purchase rights to this utility and bundle it preinstalled on every R7. It basically gives you a little mouse icon in the system tray on the desktop (right beside the touch keyboard icon) and tapping that icon turns the touch screen into a huge track pad! (Touching the screen and dragging actually moves the pointer around)Touching it again turns it off and causes the touch screen to act as normal. The default mode places a little track pad along the right side of the screen, but I like the full screen mode which allows the entire screen to be used. (I also changed the setting to allow a single tap on the screen to act as a "click".)
This has basically replaced the touch pad, and I keep the screen pulled right up to the keyboard! I see no need for the touch pad after installing this app, and it makes it much easier to use the windows desktop while the R7 is in "tablet mode".