Maximum PC

I have now experienced two different incidents with Acer products and their "recovery" procedures, both of which were massive failures and never resulted in actual recoveries at all. The first occurred three years ago when a co-worker of mine decided to sell his homebuilt desktop computer and purchase a netbook. He went to the local WalMart store and decided on an Acer Aspire One netbook. After purchasing it, he took it to the local library and attempted to surf the Internet through the library's free wi-fi hotspot. After obtaining the network key for the wi-fi and attempting to surf, he kept getting the "Internet Explorer cannot display the page" error. He then contacted me, and I went to the local library to meet him and help him troubleshoot the problem. I began with the "Diagnose the Problem" button below the error, but got absolutely nowhere (surprise!!!) with Microsoft's built-in Networking Diagnostics troubleshooter. I was able to see that the netbook was connected to the wi-fi hotspot, but I was unable to find anything that would explain an issue with being able to surf the web with IE (this netbook had Windows Vista Home Premium as its OS)--there were no errant LAN settings, proxy server settings, etc. So I decided to consult the owner's manual and run the recovery program by performing a full system recovery from the hidden recovery partition on the netbook's hard drive. After the "recovery", the netbook was able to connect to the wi-fi network of the library, but was still unable to display any webpage. I advised my co-worker to take the netbook back to WalMart, explain to them why he was returning it, and find something else (he finally purchased a Toshiba notebook and it has been working flawlessly for him ever since).

My most recent experience involved an attempt to recover an Acer Aspire 15.6" notebook. The co-worker supplied me with the system's recovery disks which had been made by the manufacturer. After receiving some cryptic errors during the first two attempts to run the recovery CDs and a third attempt which resulted in a "Recovery failed" message, I dug a little deeper and found that the Seagete 320 GB SATAII laptop hard drive had failed the S.M.A.R.T. parameters due to a large number of bad sectors on the drive. So I purchased a new Seagate laptop hard drive (same exact model number) and installed it. After verifying that it passed the SeaTools S.M.AR.T. diagnostics, I ran the Acer recovery DVDs in the proper sequence, but after the recovery was "complete", and I rebooted the system, I was greeted with the message "No bootable device found--insert the boot disk and press any key". I tried several more times to run the recovery DVDs with the new hard drive (both in IDE mode and AHCI mode in the BIOS), but still received the same error messsage. I then ordered a new set of recovery DVDs from Acer and ran them, but still received the same damn message. After checking the laptop's memory with several passes of memtest86+ and not receiving any errors, I ran the SeaTools program and was able to perform a full erase on the drive from the Seatools CD, so I am left to conclude that the recovery disks that Acer claims will allow you to restore the factory-installed software to a new hard drive are a massive steaming pile of fail as well.

First problem.

Hey some people liked Vista more then XP. Clearly they were dropped on their head repeated as a child but they liked it.

well my copy of vista 64 was free, it works and i have no problems with it. come to think of it my vista 32 was free too. win 7 still has its own problems, why are you not shaking your fingers at it. no OS is perfect, that includes linux. there are still lot of win 98 being used as well, people like to stick with things that they have spent time learning and know something about. they just dont need to have the latest and greatest all the time. even more so when it is someone else telling you it is the latest and greatest, because they say so.

I cannot count the number of times Vista blew up on me on all my fingers and toes. It was much less stable than the stuff it was to replace.

perhaps in your limited experience, there was some operator error. or perhaps it was fixed in one of its many updates that you wouldnt have known about.

My dad had the same problems, and when I took a look at it, it was the result of an update breaking drivers. We upgraded to Windows 7, which has problems that are less annoying and troublesome.

I'm using Vista right now and its still a pile of steaming dog crap on a cold morning. Honestly a 1500 pound guy that's skin is fused to his bed can run better this thing. I know some of its the outdated cheap hardware but Vista plays its part as well.

Grab a copy of Fedora if you find all your programs have open source/linux counterparts that work for you.

My Vista home premium works fine. I must be god.

No, you just got SP2.
We upgraded before SP2 was available for our particular PC. The first five attempts nearly killed the computer.

Well I had Vista Home premium on SP1, so I must be god.

For some reason, we got opted out of SP1 and I haden't quite realized it at the time. SP1 had the first round of huge improvements.

see my last post.

Can you manipulate the space-time continuum? Because if you can do that, than you would be a god.

these days Vista is not in the list no more. We now have a win8 but most of the people at this uses win7 because they don't have win8 yet.