I usually recommend Acer PC's to our students, especially if it's a laptop they're after. These come with 12 months on site maintenance as standard, and from what feedback I've had from students, the technicians seem to be fairly reliable and always try to fix the problems on-site rather than take the machines away for repair (some on site maintenance companies have been known to take machines away to the workshop if the fault has been more than half an hours work). Acer laptops have also always come with this warranty as standard, but since laptops are trickier to fix on-site, the technician usually had to take it away for repair. Acer have now introduced a standard replacement warranty for laptops, where if the laptop fails, the technician may just swap it for a new one. Unless the fault is a hard disk problem, the old hard drive can be swapped into the new machine and the student shouldn't lose any >saved work. > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%