Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s third- largest personal computer maker, was sued by customers claiming the company’s notebooks lacked adequate memory to properly run the pre-installed Vista operating system.
The machines are defective and fraudulently marketed as able to run a premium version of Microsoft Corp’s Vista software, said a complaint filed on Wednesday against the Taiwanese company’s US unit in a federal court in San Francisco. Two Ohio residents who bought an Acer Aspire notebook last year filed the lawsuit.
The notebooks, which cost about US$586, don’t meet Microsoft’s recommended minimum requirement of 2 gigabytes of memory to run the system and graphics, which causes very slow operations or frequent freezing and requires the purchase of additional memory, the complaint said.
The customers who sued seek to represent thousands of others who bought Acer notebooks. They want a court order blocking deceptive ads and forcing the company to refund customers or fix the problem by providing more memory or replacing the computers.
Alison Williams, a spokeswoman at Acer America Corp in San Jose, California, didn’t immediately return a voice-mail message.
Henry Wang (汪島雄), Acer spokesperson in Taipei, said yesterday the company’s legal affairs division was now looking into the case.
additional reporting by Jerry Lin
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