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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