stupendous.net

I bought two Acer AL2416W monitors about 2 years ago when we were in Japan. Great monitors, high resolution, good colour, and they’re pretty cheap - only 100,000 yen new at the time, now they’re down near the $450AU mark.

But a few months ago, my wife and I were eating dinner, and there was a loud POP! We looked around, didn’t see what it was, I figured just a small book fell over or something. Then again. POP! I looked around, this time saw smoke coming out of one of the Acer’s, ran over and unplugged it.

After that, nada. Plug it back in, whatever, nothing happened. ACER logo would flash, but then it would power save.

Now, this would be unexceptional - random bits of hardware do fail from time to time, and in the IT industry one just shrugs, and buys another, and moves on. Thats what I did.

Now, I’m wishing I didn’t. The SECOND monitor I bought in Japan, at the same time, both dated with build date of 2005/11, have died. The second one died in exactly the same way with the same behavior. Now, this time, I’m going to open it up and figure out what went wrong because that’s just shoddy electronics. Acer should be ashamed. Crappy products. I’ll never buy another piece of hardware from them again.

Now I have a monitor sitting on my desk, dated 2007/11, and I hope that it survives long enough for me to experience my new computer when it arrives.

Couldn’t recommend buying ACER to anyone anymore.