Acer's Secret Business Model Somehow Involves Envelopes
We don't know what Acer is up to, but they've clearly figured out some way to make a lot of money by mailing unnecessary discs free of charge to customers. Do they own the envelope company? Is Acer secretly owned by the USPS? Or maybe someone at Acer is just trying to look busy. Nick writes:
To date I've received one batch of five flat pacs [and] one batch of seventeen flat pacs. Each flat pac has three restoration discs (for a total of 66 discs), none of the flat pacs I've received has contained the promised system disc.
Having bought an Acer AX-3200 ( a small HTPC with blu-ray, and a great price point) I open it to discover that Acer is too cheap to include restore discs. An obvious necessity what with the miasma of fatal errors lurking out there for the windows PC user.
I call Acer, doe-eyed in my naivete, to request some. Two weeks they say. Meanwhile I try to start the computer up, no dice, Vista falls flat on its face right out of the box. I call Acer, they say they'll send some system restore discs, no charge, three day shipping. Great. I call Newegg, the retailer in all this, and they cheerfully take the computer back, sending me another overnight, stand up guys that they are.
The second computer works just fine. Blu-Ray is a huge pig, but that's something else. Anyway, in the mean time five flat-pacs arrive from Texas each with three 'Restoration Sdics' (sic) and a piece of paper that tells me in four languages to insert the system disc before any restoration sdics. No system disc(s) to be found anywhere. Call Acer. A Texas twang tells me that you really have to have this system disc if you want to do anything. They'll send just the system disc this time, because you know, tough times, and even Acer can't be expected to remain unaffected, in some misty tower of waste. Ok, we'll see.
Two weeks later these show up on the porch [see pic of 17 envelopes], all the same, none with a system disc.
Acer, you and Microsoft need to have a personnel swap meet or something.
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You can make your system discs on the second PC. Acer as well as most PC manufacturers include a program that will allow you to burn your own recovery discs. If I remember correctly most Acer's have this utility located in the little Acer toolbar thingy on the top of the desktop. If that isnt there it should be under the all programs part of the start menu
in Acer's defence...
Their customer service is based in the U.S., that's big right?
Also, I bought a low end desktop about 1 1/2 years ago. It came with a 17" widescreen LCD monitor which had a line of stuck green pixels from top to bottom. Sent it back to get a 17" non-widescreen monitor. Called and said I indeed wanted a widescreen. They didn't have any available so they sent me a 19" monitor instead. Satisfied.
Again, their call center is in the U.S.
@thrid001: Wrong - my Mac came with OS X restore discs. Windows companies don't do it anymore for some reason though.
On pretty much every Windows System it is your sworn duty to run the restore disc creation tool as soon as you boot to the very first usable desktop. If you don't, please surrender your computer operators license and promptly report to the nearest Reeducation Facility. ;-)
I'm happy that Apple isn't so cheap to not include hard copy's of everything installed by them. OS X and iLife DVD's are always in the box.
Secret Business Model?
Is Gob trying to buy a yacht again?
@thrid001: So wait, what do windows-only computers come with, and what are you supposed to do if the hard drive or the OS go bad, or you want to put a bigger hard drive in, or any myriad reasons to need the windows disc and hardware drivers? My last non-Apple laptop was several years ago and had restore discs that came in handy more than once..
@se7a7n7: I think you only get points for where your call center is located if the call center solves something. If it's useless, I might actually be happier to think it's at least cheap--i.e., offshore--and useless.
Same thing happened with me, with acer. Got an acer last BF and requested restore CD's.
"It has built in restoration." Is what the reps script said, I finally told them I tried and it didn't work. They mailed out recovery discs and they were the wrong ones. Call back, tell them and they send them again, the wrong ones!
I returned the thing.
@ZombieFlanders: To answer your question:
As long as you have a burner windows will happily make you your very own disk ...
But I really do agree, not sending the disk with the computer is most extremely bogus.
@thrid001: Dell laptops and desktops both still come with a windows install disk, drivers disk and applications install disks.
The "restore to factory" function is provided by a hidden partition on the hard drive, I think you can back it up but I have never needed to, preferring to reinstall from scratch.
@thrid001:
Toshiba and Dell computers still come with them. Acer, eMachine, HP, etc you simply need to burn them yourself.
When you burn Acer restore disks you get 2 OS restore disks and 1 Applications and Driver disk... a total of 3 disks. I wonder what the mysterious 4th disk is!
@brent_r: Not always. I've been trying to make a rescue disc for my ThinkPad for a while, and nothing. I'll eventually probably break down and ask support for a disc.
@krispykrink: I'm still boggled that people still buy computers with Winbloze on them... you get what you pay for, people. Every single Mac I've bought comes with all discs needed for anything, and X is far superior to Windows.
Unless you like to play games. Yes I know you can boot to windows on a Mac using parallels but you still cant get a good video card for a Mac
@thrid001: In case it stops working fine. Same principle as backups -- you don't need them until you need them.
@thrid001: Wait, so you're mad at the guy for wanting something logical?
He may need to reload Windoze after the Newegg return timeframe is up.
But way to look out.
This makes my brain hurt. :(
@Gorphlog: I have a Sony Vaio laptop and did this with a pair of DVD-R's from a pack I purchased at Wal-Mart.
Few weeks later I needed them, used them, and found out that either my DVD-R's were bad or I have a faulty DVD burner. Sony was kind enough to overnight me a set they made at no charge but it still burns me up that they weren't in the box to begin with.
All I lost was a few week's work on a couple of websites and two days, but I am partially to blame for not buying and using an external HDD or some other form of secondary backup.
@Gorphlog: The new Nvidia 9600 in my Macbook Pro chugs out the new call of duty just fine, but I can't get a good video card in my mac right?
Not true, at least not in every case.
My Dell laptop (purchased Nov 2007) didn't include any restore discs. It was a simple phone call to get the discs shipped, FREE. They even sent me another, complete set for free since they didn't send out a Windows restore disc the first time, or I lost it. Either one.
@Warll: The school I work for orders HP computers. With each one, we are given a Windows installation disc, even though we really only need one for each model (image-based deployment). The HP I just ordered from their "home" store? Not so much. And the only option on their website is for me to comp over $15 for "replacements". Bah. Looks like I'm calling India...
@thrid001: The Dell mini 9 I just bought a month ago came with restore discs... wait, there's no internal CD drive? Oh well.
My Dell came with a restore disc. Even after I lost it and formatted the recovery partition for that extra 10GB (lol I know), they sent me a Vista disc.
@mewyn dyner: Thinkpads are a nightmare when it comes to the support disks. I wasted weeks trying to get them to work right.
@GuinevereRucker: We could argue about this, but what's the point?
My experience is different from yours. I have used MS since I was 5. I love vista, I've been using it from Beta and it has never crashed on me and everything I use works better on it than it did on XP.
I tried a Mac for a year. It was a POC, it slowed down to being almost unusable daily and that was when I was only using it for web browsing. it was a fight to get things to work the way that I wanted them to and 90% of the things I do on a regular basis just weren't available for a Mac. Then there's the whole, why learn something new if it doesn't work half as well as what I'm doing now?
Ha, "Sdics" indeed. I just bought a new acer desktop and had to laugh when it went through several "isntalling" routines upon firing up.
it's an Acer...you're supposed to make your own restore disks when you get it. you get what you pay for...
A lot of companies are no longer sending restore CD's. My new HP lap top didn't get sent with restore CD's. My girlfriends new Dell, no CD's. My sisters new dell, no CD's. I think Dell expects you to pay for them too. I haven't gotten that far.
The issue with "restoration sdics" (LOL! too troo) is universal with all computer makers as far as I can tell. Every computer I've gotten since 1999 has required me to make my own restore set. No big deal. Assuming that the system boots to start with, which apparently was the issue with the OP's machine.
The hairy big deal that I just found out when I was trying to help a friend restore his system over the holidays is that (at least HP's) "restoration" sets don't include a boot function that allows you to do anything to the computer other than completely wipe it out and start over. This is a real problem...sometimes you really need to go in and recover that day or two of un-backed-up information or grab a couple of license keys for software installed over the Internet before you wipe a system. Just a clean boot and enough functionality to run Belarc advisor and copy files to a remote drive would be all that's needed...but no. All or nothing. BOGUS!
@realjen01: I have an Aspire One netbook and my friend, mentioned below, just bought an Aspire full size laptop. Both are sweet little machines with quality comparable to HP's. And Acer's tech support seems to be US-based!
@thrid001: Toshiba, Fujitsu, ASUS, Gateway, Dell, and Macs all come with recovery discs. The rest give you the ability to burn them on your on as long as you have at least the intelligence of a retarded monkey.
1) Acers tend to be priced cheaper than their competition so stop calling them cheap. You are too if you are buying a junk Acer.
2) Acer have a program on them to create discs.
3) Returning the original model was kind of shady after calling to get new free discs.
4) RESTORE DISCS ARE SYSTEM DISCS!!!
When I buy a computer whether from Dell or HP I immediately format that crap. I do not want their crap software on it and I build my own restore cd's.
Nowadays unless your 70+ yrs of age. There shouldnt be a reason why you dont know how to use a computer.
I use Acer a lot here at work, we have 17 of them right now and in a business environment they are great and the customer service is even very helpful. I have found that for home they are still cheap and 'adequate' but the customer service for home users seems to be hapless.
I did one time receive an Acer with the disk they use to 'clone' that model still in the drive.
For a business environment where idiots are going to destroy whatever you give them, cheap Acers are great, for home, I'll still build my own.
@snowburnt: I must say I think you're the first person I've ever seen that actually likes Windows! Most people I've met simply put up with it because "I like gaming" or "I work in IT".
I agree that Macs weren't that great in the system 9 days. Ever since X came out though, I've loved the Unix underpinnings and the OS.
Try pressing Alt+F10 repeatedly during boot.
HUH?
"discover that Acer is too cheap to include restore discs." No computer company includes restore discs anymore
"The second computer works just fine." So why do you need this disc you are bitching about?