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Acer: The Crapware Con

Posted on 29 Oct 2009 at 14:17

Acer’s pile of preinstalled software had a disastrous effect on the Aspire laptop’s start-up time. The machine took an arthritic 2mins 44secs to boot with the crapware – more than two minutes longer than its clean boot time. Only the Sony’s software proved more demanding.

Luckily, the Acer’s application performance wasn’t quite as disastrous; the installed software didn’t tax our test laptop in our 2D benchmarks – unlike most of the other machines, we didn’t see a drop in performance with the crapware running.

Its memory footprint was frugal, too, with the base level of 726MB increasing to only 952MB when numerous applications were loading.

Unfortunately, the applications were largely of poor quality. Acer Arcade Deluxe is a low-rent version of Windows Media Center. Acer GameZone contains 19 titles – but all are 60-minute demos that nagged us to stump up cash to play further.

Acer’s software took up a considerable 2.4GB of hard disk space. Given that most of the bundled software was barely worth the time of day, and the appalling impact on boot times, Acer is doing its customers few favours by pre-loading this package on its PCs.

Rating: 2/6

(Model tested: Aspire 5536)

Author: Mike Jennings