Suggestions for Acer Predator / Gaming Laptops

randomusername

Dear acer,

By this post, I do not mean to offend the engineers who've worked on some of these projects, but being a user for the past couple of months, I have a few suggestions that you guys can look forward to working on.

I have been using the Acer Helios 300 PH 315-55 for around the past 6-7 months and in any form or way have I been disappointed by it as a normal user, but as a power user, there are multiple things that I struggle with, some of them being the following : 

1. Migrating or booting windows is a painful process [IRST and Driver Issues]:

Whenever I want to do a clean windows boot install, I have to use my keyboard to  navigate through the entire installation, this is because drivers aren’t preloaded, so touchpad, wifi, soundcard,etc., don’t work out of the box, therefore you have to manually install them later on, not to mention that means keeping a copy of drivers already saved in your usb drive or external storage to install later. This is just to get things going, you’ll obviously need to update your windows and find better drivers [Snappy Driver] is a good utility to keep in your toolkit.

2. No Centralised Driver Installation and Poor Driver Setup Program Design

Now that we’ve talked about manually installing drivers to get the system ready set up for base level usage, let’s just talk about how the driver installation process, along with the driver setup scripts are poorly written. It would be great if along with the separate drivers, acer provided a centralised driver installation process, maybe in an executable file too.

At the moment the drivers consist of .bat files that are written poorly, I’ve read this code myself and the installation process definitely does not consider edge case scenarios and contain basic error handling. Not only does this leave extra work for the user to perform extra image scans + system scans + hardware scans to make sure that the entire system works properly, it also feels like a lot of work for performing an extremely basic task, not to mention they can potentially break the system in some cases.

3. No restoration of specific settings during migration of operating systems or formatting.

Acer along with other companies provide with a very useful option of limiting battery charge to 80% for the longevity of the battery, however, this setting is embedded directly to the low level system and isn’t reset during complete system formats or migrating operating systems. I noticed this the other day, while migrating to linux my charge was still stuck at 80% and it shouldn’t be the case since acer hasn’t made its control programs for multiple platforms like linux.Since the source code for these applications isn’t open source it’s hard to judge whether this is easy to do or not because I do understand that these settings are usually embedded along the firmware settings and are loaded with the bios instead of the OS boot, but I do know it’s possible and hope that there is a fix for it.

4. No multiplatform support.

Since there are particular components in some laptops like rgb keyboards and manual control fans, turbo mode buttons, etc. that directly deal with hardware and interact via low level WMI methods, it is a hassle to write and find scripts to control these components. Acer’s predator sense and acer care centre aren’t available on linux, if you can provide those utilities for linux as well then it would prove to be very useful, since it isn’t only hard to find third party scripts but they are also hard to trust for multiple reasons, one of them being letting someone interact with low level components which might damage the computer’s longevity.

If anyone’s reading this, at this point I’m sure you’ll have me certified as a crybaby but I hope you get the point. Please understand that I’m not trying to make the engineers feel bad about their product but just giving suggestions and room for improvement. I'm sure that these engineers are skilled and not everyone is going to be doing the things that I mentioned above [especially for a laptop that leans towards the gaming audience].

The changes I mentioned however, I’m 100% sure would be appreciated by the hundreds of people going through these problems like me, you should definitely check out reddit and github, you’ll find out how many people are facing the same problems. I’m also sure that I could be wrong about some of my assumptions and would appreciate it if someone can enlighten me. 

I hope that acer tries to work up on these things, that’s all I have to say :) 

Ingrid-Acer

Hello randomusername,

Thank you for your participation in the Acer Community.
Thank you for sharing your feedback on the PH 315-55. We will pass along and make sure it reaches the relevant team.
Just to clarify, the Acer forum discussions were designed as a peer-to-peer support
community where Acer users help other Acer users. Although this community is not a direct portal to Customer Service, many Acer employees
read the various topics posted here and you will notice that some Acer employees interact
with members when appropriate, but primarily we want the Acer Community to be a place where members can exchange their
own advice and ideas.

Best Regards,

Acer-Ingrid