acer iconia W700 - thoughts after owning for 3weeks

Hi guys.

well. when i got this device it did seem to be a brilliant piece of kit. fast, nice screen and much more usable than an android or iOS tablet. The only oddity really is the camera is not usable with the case. Surely they could have cut a nice hole in the back for the camera?

However, after a week i rebooted after a windows update. The screen just halts at a black screen soon after the bios screen. This flashes on and off between a black screen and no power to the screen (screen appears dark black like when its off).

After much messing about i managed to get into windows boot screen and use a restore point and the tablet works for another week. Then the same thing happens again and i use the restore method and its all ok.

Another week goes by and this happens again. The only problem now is that my restore points have magically vanished and all i have is one from when i installed a game and it creates a restore point for when directx is installed. Unfortunately using this restore point doesn’t fix anything and im stuck with a black flashing screen. I cannot access safe mode or anything else bar recovery screen. But as i don’t own a USB DVD drive i cannot do anything with it until today when i use a spare one at work. This is annoying as i have many USB drives and sticks at home that i could use but as the supplied disks only come in a restore set i cannot just install win8 from one DVD. Annoying again.

After MUCH messing about i finally manage to get my restore disks working and get windows back up and running. The only problem now is that my keyboard doesn’t work. The BT pairing seems to be dead.

So, after less than month of owning the device i have had to fix it 3 times and need another fix for the BT keyboard. I am really giving up on this device. It seem a decent idea but badly put together (why force us to buy a DVD drive? Why not let us create a bootable drive on a USB HDD?). The BT keyboard isn’t available until windows loads so i cannot use safe mode unless i boot from windows and set this. This is stupid as you often use safe mode when windows doesn’t load.

So basically this tablet is useless without a USB keyboard (even though you can plugin the keyboard to the USB port?? It just doesn’t work as a USB keyboard) and a DVD drive.

I am tempted to send this back as in 25 years in the IT industry i have never had so many issues with a PC.

Is anyone else getting sick of issues already? When it works its a nice machine, bar win8s oddities. But the fact i have had to mess around with it so much in 3 weeks doesn’t give me much confidence really