I have an AcerAcross 486 for about 20 years with no problems. 32megs of ram and duel boot between OS/2 v3 Warp and Dos/DeskviewX/wfw3.11/PC GEOS up to the last Breadbox Ensemble.

An ACER Celery F1 gave no issues whatsoever with a customized #! linux with XFCE4 as my DE. And yes I watched BOOBtube videos with it with a whopping 2gigs of memory no problems at all 😉

the idea of 'fanboy' type adoration of a company that makes things always strikes me as real strange, a sort of misplaced tribal tendency to hero worship or something, maybe a feeling of being part of a winning set of people (through the amazing collaborative act of .... buying something !)

but some people may like acer for their products, sure its fine to mod away though 😀

Acer products are a lottery: would you get that unit that will be durable as your grandpa or would you get the usual unreliable crap?

Zup wrote on 1971-03-11, 23:38:

Acer products are a lottery: would you get that unit that will be durable as your grandpa or would you get the usual unreliable crap?

Got any links to qualify that?

That statement is like stating Harley Davidson make crap motorcycles. Which they do and plenty of evidence to back that up btw.

so the answer is yes, they are a thing.

Acer's corporate HQ is less than 5 km / 3 miles from my current residence. 😉

IMHO it's a mixed bag: While ALi chipsets were praised on SS7 MB, most DIYers I know disliked Acer's complete systems for their proprietary designs and sub-par components (when compared with Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, i.e. companies selling components in retail). A typical example was the 1995 Aspire series:

Photos from https://www.acer.com/40thanniversary/en/1987-2000.html

J.R. Raith (@jrronimo)'s reply to LGR's tweet had nice photos and video showing how the back panel was arranged and opening method. DIYers hated those proprietary chassis, fat front bezels with eject button extenders prone to break, tons of preinstalled bloatware, etc., but computer first-timers back in 1995-6 really loved those dark green curves and "newbie-friendly" interface.

In recent years, they tried entering smartphone / tablet / wearable devices market but failed quite miserably, so they switched to "smart" Buddhist leap beads and Catholic eRosary. Catholic population is limited in Taiwan so I don't know whether eRosary is popular or not, but the Buddhist leap beads were selling like hotcakes. Their Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop with "gold on white / pink" color scheme also broke the stereotype of traditional "red on black" color scheme of gaming computers (MSI in particular), becoming highly popular among female gamers.

In summary, I'd say Acer is more capable of designing consumer electronics for niched markets, as well as providing generic OEM systems to schools and corporates, rather than building high performance computers for tech-savvy DIYers.

I would call a fanboy somebody who is brand loyal to the point of being irrational.
I like modern Acer laptops, but my reasons are mercenary. They make decent laptops that are cheap.

Back when I bought mine there was no competition at ~$400 for the "legacy" features I wanted, thick enough size to probably cool itself without throttling, and good battery life. When it went on sale for $325 it was an easy decision.
I like AOpen motherboards but I've never used one long term, and the only ones I've seen were ATX, nothing as old as a 486.

No, I won't throw rocks if I hear that you modified your motherboard. It's yours, and it's not doing you any good sitting in a box. 😀

I'm an Acer fanboy in that I've liked their designs, however I don't own one or any of their products. Their Revo One media PC was a great design that was far ahead of it's time, but the commonly available components at the time it was available ensured that it was a dud and they didn't sell many, let alone offer it in the configs that people wanted to buy. If they were to bring that design back with current Intel CPUs and M.2 SSDs, it would be a must-have media PC purchase.

Yes they had some pleasing curvy, swoopy and organic external case designs. Unfortunately that seemed to be the same period where they couldn't decide to stay AT or go ATX and had some crossbreed of both that was compatible with nothing else. Then their performance during the capacitor plague was dismal. By A64 they seemed to have pulled it together again though.

I guess I could get taken for an Acer fanboy, depending what I had set up at the time, got at least 4 Acer branded net/notebooks, 2 Acer monitors, some Acer keyboards and mice. Then a couple of Acer made E-machines and 3 Gateway-Acers. But then another day I might have an array of Compaq or IBM crap together. I guess they're higher on my list than HP for notebooks now, Toshiba next maybe, then Dell then Lenovo... IDK everybody only as good as their last couple of ranges, could do a turkey any time.

That T-shirt company that maintains a strange sideline in antiquated motorbikes, 😉 they've only had one model to interest me, MT350E

Aopen made some fairly decent stuff. Motherboards, soundcards, chassis and power supplies were all of very good quality. I didn't like their monitors or optical drives though. Acer branded systems in the early 90s were also pretty good, but like compaq, really went south in the second half of the 90s.

Doesn't matter what brand you choose, someone somewhere will have had the same bit of hardware and feel nostalgic towards it and call you a butcher for modding it.
Asus or Acer both mass produced stuff so while 486 era as a whole is getting rarer to find in general, I wouldn't call it special therefore acceptable to mod.

dormcat wrote on 2021-11-22, 15:23:

IMHO it's a mixed bag: While ALi chipsets were praised on SS7 MB, most DIYers I know disliked Acer's complete systems for their proprietary designs and sub-par components (when compared with Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, i.e. companies selling components in retail).
A typical example was the ... Aspire series:

Completely agree!
When I get computers with "Aspire" labels, I usually just pick a huge screwdriver, slam it into the case and pry it open forcefully to salvage CPU, RAMs and maybe cables/cards/drives.

But on the other hand, their ALi/ULi chipsets are decent, and after my clearout of all that retro garbage I had, I kept a S939 ULi mobo and a 1992 multi I/O IDE card, the latter because it has lots of jumpers and is the most-configurable such card I ever encountered.
And I like that 1999 Acer 19" ATX case which houses my HP Z400 DOS/Windows computer, because it is of aluminium, super light in comparison to the super-heavy HP case which is so stupidly designed that the old full-metal non-caddy icy boxes cannot be used in it.

BTW, your cat is sooo cute 😀

retardware wrote on 2021-11-23, 12:50:

Completely agree!
When I get computers with "Aspire" labels, I usually just pick a huge screwdriver, slam it into the case and pry it open forcefully to salvage CPU, RAMs and maybe cables/cards/drives.

One of their most funny case design was Revo One SFF desktop computer that looked like an ostrich egg. Several color schemes were released, including a Hello Kitty limited edition being asked for NT$12880 (US$460) new or NT$9500 (US$340) used on an auction site.

retardware wrote on 2021-11-23, 12:50:

BTW, your cat is sooo cute 😀

Not my cat, but a friendly stray in my neighborhood. Unfortunately she disappeared a couple of months after this photo was taken; I could only wish that she had been adopted by a good and caring family.