Minimally Exceptional

I recently picked up an acer laptop from someone at work. The hard drive failed, and he was in the market to buy a new computer anyway, so he passed it along to me.

I just happened to have an extra 2.5″ hard drive, so I plugged it in, tracked down the recovery disc, and fired it up.

Turns out acer doesn’t give you a factory restore disc. Instead, they put the restore data on a recovery partition and have the user burn their own recovery disc.

It’s a cost cutting measure, I guess. Doesn’t sound like too evil of an idea, but as always there is a catch. What if your hard drive fails? No problem. Put in a new drive and restore from your burned recovery disc.

The thing about burned media is that consumer grade writable media is more unstable than a pressed cd or DVD. As a result, burned discs can have reliability issues when it comes to using them for backup and recovery. Needless to say, the burned recovery disc has failed, so there is no way to get the original drivers and OS reinstalled.

A quick review of acers website shows that there is a twenty four hour help desk. I fire off an email with my problem and get a relatively personalty-free answer in a few hours. This email told me two things: I was dealing with an automated help system (A ROBOT), and I could purchase a new recovery disc directly from acer.

Great! I click the link, enter the serial number, and… get an error code. I report the error code to the help desk rep who then tells me that acer is no longer able to produce my recovery disk because this is a “legacy machine” that is no longer supported. A legacy machine? Come on. This laptop is 20 months old. If it was a work machine we would still be depreciating the bastard. His (its) advice to me? Purchase a retail operating system, install it, and track down drivers for hardware on the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but I do not have extra cash lying around than I can burn on another copy of an operating system that I already own a legitimate license for. Acer should be embarassed that this is “the best [they] can do” for customers who spend a grand (or more) on a computer and accessories and need help less than two years later.

There is no way that I am the only person in this situation, which means there is likely a small but angry group of acer owners with effectively bricked units, and the way I see it there are three options:

1) shell out a bunch of money for a copy of an OS that they already own a license for,

2) switch to a free OS that they likely don’t want, or

3) get over the fact that their laptop is now a large and expensive paperweight.

None of those opitions are good ones. It’s no wonder people pirate software. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but I can tell you with pretty solid confidence where my next laptop will NOT be coming from.

Oh, sorry – did I say “paperweight”? I meant “Legacy Paperweight”.