Pharm readers might have been wondering about the decline in posts Down on the Pharm. The computer hard drive had been trying to die for months, and it finally did. Before it died, your friendly Pharmer (on Nov 1, 2012) purchased an Acer prebuilt computer from New Egg. It appeared to be a good buy, with plenty of speed for office use, and lots of memory. However………. Pharmer’s luck with computers ran out. In short, it appears from all the time spent with tech help, and the need to send it in for “repairs”, that the existing operating system, (and 2 sets of recovery disks) for this computer, were not configured correctly to work with the hardware. The Acer was unusable from day 1, and had to be sent out for “repair” for the second time on Dec 29, 2012. This second failure was the final impetus to drive the Pharmer to build her own rig. After some quick business, buying the individual components from Tiger Direct, (not a kit), it’s up and running, before the ACER came back from the shop. You can see Pharmer’s first build below. She has entered new phase of life: Geek-O-Pause!
By the way…… Learn which ACER computer NOT to buy. It’s now out of stock at New Egg, but if you’re thinking about getting one of these elsewhere, build your own!
Later there will be some updates and a full description of what went into build number one, which appears to be running Windows 7 Home Premium very well on that solid state drive.
Amazing job!
We've been starving for the pearls of wisdom….bone dry here in the desert. Glad you made the move, my son's done a number of these but I don't have quite that level of competence or confidence to do a total build from scratch. Kudos!
Building one is not so hard to do. Choosing compatible components is a bit of a job, because you have to pay attention to the specs and match them up. Assembly is easy. If you\’ve recovered from the death of hard drives then installing drivers and operating systems won\’t be a big deal. I avoided using a bare bones kit, because I found that to be almost as limiting as buying pre-built.
The hilarious thing is how much faster I could make a new one than Acer could repair the one that I sent back. There is still no sign of it.
Looking great! 😀
I as of late purchased an ACER ES1-512-C88M thru Walmart.com for my sister in Garland, Tx. It ended up being a colossal slip-up. No proprietor's manual accompanied the PC. Probably the manual is in the PC itself however nobody could make sense of how to get 70-412 Pass-4sure it. The ACER Computer bolster telephone number was amazingly uncooperative in serving to determine this issue. I got their number thru Walmart and was told I could just get help thru them. This PC utilizes Windows 8.1. That is a colossal issue. Both my sister and I are acquainted with Windows 7 however Windows 8.1 is difficult to utilize and greek to the two of us.