Well, my first computer just died during my winter in Mexico. But hey, look on the bright side, it was only a week before Black Friday, or what they call it down here, Bien Fin (and it lasts for 4 days).
I had recently had some work done on my backup Laptop in Canada just before coming down to Mexico, an HP, and my technician told me what he thought of HP's. Not good. He recommended an Acer, Asus or even a Dell or Lenovo. They were much better than HP. Actually he put HP at the bottom of the list for reliability.
I didn't disagree, because I had gotten 5 years out of a used HP, and my 10 year old HP was still running well (knock on wood). Although I had to replace the HDD with an SSD, and clean it up, it was still running well.
So I started investigating Bien Fin sales outlets and prices in Mexico. The best deal I found was an Acer Aspire 15.6 inch, HD laptop with Intel 7 processor and everything else I needed. Having used Windows before, in the back of my mind I knew that if the Windows 10 came in Spanish, it was a simple task to switch over to English. My first mistake.
So I buy the laptop online, and go to Bestbuy to pick it up on the Friday of Bien Fin. The technician unwraps it and gets it fired up, and I ask him to change the language to English. He tries, but says I have to call Microsoft support and have them do it.
Because I wasn't feeling well, food poisoning, I contacted Microsoft support the next morning. I tried to add English as a language myself, but without success. It kept showing only one language, Spanish. Then Microsoft tried and tried to install English for me, without success. He even took remote control of the laptop, but still couldn't do it. This is where I made my second mistake. I should have called Acer right then.
But unfortunately I asked SSS at Microsoft Support what my solution would be. The only thing he recommended was purchasing a full copy of Windows 10 that included English. So, I sign into my Microsoft account and order a Home Version of Windows 10 and try to install it (still trying to use the Spanish language on my PC). Without success, I contacted Microsoft Support again, and they remotely custom installed it for me. Voila, I now had English.
I started downloading my data and other software that I needed for my writing and other ventures, and then realized that some of the links and icons that had originally been on the laptop were no longer there. I finally decided to contact Acer Support and to register the product. Of course I couldn't do this yesterday because the laptop was all in Spanish.
I talked to a very polite, they all are, guy named Christopher S, and he was basically no help whatsoever. I found that I would probably lose everything I had done if he returned my laptop to it's factory settings, and the laptop would also probably revert to Spanish only. This I didn't want. So I vented a little frustration and signed off. Oh, but before I did, Chris wrote me that Acer did NOT sell computers with single languages. Hmmm.
So it is now Sunday, and I'm still pissed about having to spend 211.00 Cdn on a Windows 10 that I already had, except for English. So I double checked the advertisement at Bestbuy to see if I had missed the fact that this laptop was Windows 10 - Spanish only. Nope. There was no mention of this in the advertisement.
Now I contacted Microsoft Support again to see if there was any way to get a refund. I wasn't holding my breath because I sincerely feel that Microsoft is not the problem. Either the staff at Acer was incompetaet, or didn't know or was flat out lying, their laptop did have only one language. I even asked the Acer guy if Acer maybe had a policy to sell single language laptops based on the countries they were sold in. He said no.
Bestbuy could have misled clients with their advertising, or they may not have known. I've hit a wrong button on previous laptops and ended up with everything in French. It was very easy to change the language, and retailers like Bestbuy, may assume (like I did), that Windows 10 includes all languages.
Luckily I got a smoking good deal on the laptop, so the extra 211.00 didn't hurt as much, but the entire process has given me a sour taste with Acer Support. Let's hope their product lasts well, and i 10 years time I will have forgotten about this incident. Oh well, at least I've learned something new - Windows 10 comes in many different models, so make sure to check your operating system before you leave the store.
Oh, forgot to mention, the keyboard is slightly different than the English keyboard, but not a problem. I just registered the product with Acer, and it still lists Windows 10 Home as the operating system, and the only thing that suggests there might be a problem with this unit, is the keyboard is listed as Spanish. Of course, I could only find this out after registering the laptop.
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