I've been looking around for a chrome book for a few weeks now. The particular Best Buy where I live only carries 2 and neither are ones I wanted. So I drove an hour north to another best buy that had 6 in stock. I had debated on getting the Asus 2 n 1, but noticed this Acer was on sale for $50 off retail, plus it had 32 gb's of memory rather than the standard 16. The one on display worked really well and the 14" screen was a big plus. I couldn't wait to get home and try it out! Boy was I in for a shocker. Got it unpacked, plugged in, turned on and once it booted (which was fast), I logged in with my credentials, connected to my network, then launched the chrome browser. Everything was working great then BOOM! The mouse pointer disappeared. I tried everything. Considering the Chrome Books and Chrome Boxes pretty much require a mouse of some kind to navigate with, I was pretty crippled. I had to search on my phone for shortcuts on how to restart the chrome book. I did a restart a few times. I did a hard reset and power wash 3 times. After pressing Esc + refresh + power - I got the message that the chrome OS was either missing or damaged. So I created a USB recovery stick and did that. It worked! I was so happy! I went ahead and checked for updates and it updated the browser to the latest version. Played around on chrome a bit. Then decided to open up a solitaire game that's in my chrome for my mac mini. Sure enough, not 10 seconds after the game loaded, the mouse cursor disappeared. Again, I did the hard reset but this time the mouse didn't come back. After the power wash, a screen appeared asking me to connect a mouse to the chrome book (apparently it wouldn't detect it's own trackpad). I just finished reloading the recover USB drive again. Why you ask? It was the only way to "sign me out" before I pack it up and return it to the store on Tuesday. No "new" computer...whether it be a Windows based, Mac Based, or ChromeOS based....none should have any kind of hardware failures within the first 10 mins. I have 3 Acer laptops going back to 2006 and have always been impressed by them. Almost every monitor I've purchased in the last 10 years has been made by Acer. I'm typing this review from my Mac Mini and I'm using a 24" widescreen Acer monitor. This is the first Acer product I've purchased that didn't work right out of the box. Hopefully this is an isolated issue...but based on a few group message boards I've been to before writing this review, it's been an ongoing problem with chrome books from all manufactures for some time now, especially Acer. Also, I never write reviews. This is the first product I've bought from best buy in years that I've felt compelled to write a review about. So for the rest of you out there....based on the specs of this unit, if you're lucky enough for it to work for you right out of the box, it looks like a good product. Just beware that there's a chance the trackpad will fail on you, so have a spare mouse laying around. PS: if someone from Acer decides to reply to this review, think about it - why would I send it back to you for repair, when I can just return it to the store for a full refund OR exchange it for the ASUS 2 n 1 unit? I can understand if I had it for 6 months or so...but 1 day?

Read more