Big Dan's Corner

I bought a new laptop in March, I decided on the Acer 5920-6864. Price vs features it’s the best I could get for my money: 1.66 Ghz Intel dual core processor, 3 GB RAM, 160 GB HD and a bunch of other features like built in blue tooth and web cam. Now, I really like it it’s a great little laptop in fact Vista scores it better over all than my new desktop but it doesn’t feel quite as fast.

Long story short yesterday I decided to do a fresh install of Vista on it because things just seem to be slowing down. I’ve already made the restore DVD’s via Acer’s recovery manager. I should be able to pop in the discs and restore to factory roll out right?

Nope, the restore disc is looking for a recovery partition that I wiped to install Ubuntu on, which by the way works great on this laptop.  I wiped it before I created the recovery discs and the partition was empty. Acer’s included backup software wants to use that partition to back up you files. Now the interesting thing is the partition is half the HD, 80 GB. Leaving only 80 GB for actual user data. I think it’s assine, let’s set aside the fact that a good portion of the time files are lost because of hard drive failure which makes that partition “backup” partition all together useless in a hard drive failure. 80 GB for all the music and photo’s that today’s computer users store is ludicrous, my old desktop came with an 80 GB HD in 2002!

Does it make any sense to advertise plenty hard drive space then require half of it to be used for backups, which creates a false sense of security? When I popped in the restore CD I got an “mismatch error” very cryptic error message, I searched on line and see there are some work arounds. I’ll try out some of them sometime in the future. For now, I wiped the whole HD and installed Ubuntu Hardy.

I just don’t get it.. First of all manufacturers partition schemes suck, even my new HP desktop had a crappy partitioning scheme from the factory, I cleared that up and the master restore discs work fine even without the original partitioning scheme. With Acer, I’m disappointed it’s not good enough that all manufacturers are being cheap and not including restore discs, they’re leaving it to the consumer to create them. I’m guessing most do not bother which will lead to problems down the road but now even when consumers are responsible and waste DVD-R’s on creating restore discs, Acer poorly designs the restore image to require the original partitioning structure.

What the hell Acer??

Update: I found a fix and posted on the thread here on the Notebook Review Forums: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=3266605#post3266605