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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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"Dad, my laptop is dying". OK, my son needs a machine for his studies, and he's been using a very very old IBM Thinkpad for the past three years that I had used for 2 more before that. So I bought a new one.
The spec of the Acer Aspire 5051 looked great. 60GB disk good power, and dirt cheap. And so it arrived yesterday.
The 60GB drive is partitioned by the manufacturer into a 30GB and a 25 GB pair of usable partitions and a 5GB "recovery partition" (a total waste of 5GB). But the two other partitions were FAT 32, nit NTFS - amusing for a Win XP machine.
I called Acer.
"If you convert the partitions to NTFS we will not support your machine"
"If you reformat the drive to be a single partition, we will not support your machine"
"If you send the machine to us for repair we WILL reformat the disk to factory setings if you have altered it"
So, this is like being sold a car and being told that I can only drive it on the M25, despite living severla miles form iot with no means of getting it there.
The Acer machine has gone back. And there is no way I will ever buy Acer again. Pity they are imbeciles, but imbeciles do not deserve my hard earned money.
I replaced the machine yesterday with a machine from Advent, not that I have ever heard of Advent. They still have this idiotic hidden recovery partition ("it saves you having to find the recovery disk you lost, so we don't provide one"), but I have a single 55GB partition, and they can do what they please in the 5GB they have nicked.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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i've always liked Evesham when it comes to laptops... they do a good range of products across the price and technology spectrum, suited for many different needs, better yet, i've never ever been able to fault eveshams customr service. incredibly useful technical helpline, and technical callouts.
when i fried my laptops hard drive they sent a technician out to my uni to replace the drive and he reformated it for me, reinstalled windows too
i generally prefer desktops (but then i'm a PC gamer) but then, my studies don't require a laptop. Keele is fully interactive, every hall room is connected to the the uni network, with full internet access and access to the academic intranet. despite being a law student, i rarely ever set foot in the library, everything i need is online these days, chapters from books, cases, journal articles, all from my custom built PC in my bedroom.
Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, set fieri sentio et excrucior
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Acer looked ok until their ridiculous support policy and supply of obsolete disk format. He has a nice Advent machine now.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Oh dear, I hope this isn't starting off another round of everyone having computer problems!
I also have a rather old Thinkpad - a T23 which I use wirelessly when I'm not fit enough to sit at the PC ... works a treat when I'm on the sofa or in the armchair, as I only use it for browsing the net.
The power supply "brick" has just died on me. Or, more accurately, the cable from the brick has died where it goes into the connector that plugs into the laptop ... I can get enough power to charge the battery by wiggling the cable until I get a connection and then wedging everything in place! Thank goodness for e-bay: a second-hand replacement power supply for under a tenner, which should arrive later this week.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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