After having no luck resolving my problem through emails to Acer, I phoned their customer support and was patiently dealt with by a young techie for a whole hour. He walked me through a number of possible fixes and finally decided that my hard drive was partitioned improperly and they would have to give me a new one.

I had the option of either shipping my desktop, at my expense, or taking it to the Acer repair centre. Since it was less than an hour away, in Mississauga, I opted to take the computer in myself. That was on a Monday afternoon.

Rather than drive there again to pick my machine up, I told the Acer technician to ship it to my home when it was repaired. There would be no charge for shipping when it was delivered back to me.

Much to my surprise, my Acer desktop was repaired and delivered to my home on Friday of that same week. Their service was quick and efficient and restored my faith in the company. Oh, and my hard drive now has two large partitions. I am a happy gramma indeed.

Technorati Tags: Acer computer, desktop, computer repair

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I have a new Acer computer with Windows Vista. It took a while to get used to it but I’m doing okay now. The only problem is, I keep getting a message that there is no hard drive space left, even though it’s a 160 Gig hard drive. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong and then when I checked to see drive C, I realized that the computer had been partitioned.

There is a C drive which is full and holds Windows and all the other programs I have. Since it’s also the default, any documents or pictures I save go there too. There is also a D drive, which should have contained my documents and pictures. It’s totally empty and has all kinds of space. Apparently, it’s good to keep windows in a totally separate area just in case there’s ever a problem. If Windows had to be re-installed, I wouldn’t lose my work since it would be on another drive. But the fact that I had no idea what was going on made it more than a little bit bothersome to me.

Once I figured that part out, I started saving everything to the D drive. But I pity the poor person who doesn’t know how to do that and lets the computer save to its default space. Anyway, in spite of my new-found knowledge, I am still having problems. When I install a program, even if I save it to D, at least part of it goes to the C drive and I get the “no more room” message. This C drive only has 13 GB of space on it and there is no option to expand it. I had a programmer friend of mine over yesterday and he couldn’t do it either.

So now I have emailed Acer and am waiting impatiently for an answer. Since I encouraged my mother to buy the same computer, I need to find out for her sake too. Any helpful tips would be greatly appreciated!

Technorati Tags: Acer computer, Vista, hard drive problem

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I have an older laser printer, but it still works well and lasts for a long time before I have to change the ink cartridge. It’s a Brother printer, in case you’re interested and even though it’s over five years old, I was able to download a driver so that it would work with Vista.

I got into the bad habit of leaving the laser printer on the whole time my computer was on, often hours at a time. After a while, I started getting an annoying cough and could see smoky air in the hallway outside my study. Since I still had my old computer at that point, I thought the fumes might be from it, since it was probably full of dust that I couldn’t get at.

Then I read an article on healthy computing and it mentioned the fumes that laser printers emit and the fact that many people get sick from the fumes. So my problem wasn’t the old computer after all, it was the constantly running laser printer.

Once I realized that and started leaving my laser printer turned off until I needed to print, my cough got better and the smoky air disappeared.

Technorati Tags: laser printer, fumes, computer

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I mentioned the other day that I finally broke down and bought a new desktop computer with a Windows Vista operating system. I have the basic version of Vista and a fair bit of memory on the computer, so I don’t find it too slow.

But I do find it amusing that it works just like those Mac/PC commercials if you’ve seen them. Every time I do anything, including deleting a file, a message pops up asking if I authorize the action. I say yes, and another message pops up asking me if I’m sure. I suppose it is possible that someone else could have authorized the deletion and a second later I managed to take control of my computer and stopped the action. Possible, but not likely.

Like I said, so far I find it amusing. As the day goes on and it has happened more times than I can count, my amusement is fading. And I would hate to smash a brand new computer!

Technorati Tags: Windows, Vista, computer

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I finally broke down and bought a new desktop with Vista, thinking I was never going to find a new one with XP. Then, two days later, didn’t I get an email from Dell saying they were selling their computers with XP loaded until the end of this month (Feb.) Talk about annoyed, I was more than.

But I had already spent hours transferring my data and my email stuff, so I had no choice but to stick with my Vista machine. Too be fair, it hasn’t been as bad as I thought, so far.

Technorati Tags: desktop, Vista, Windows XP, Dell, computers

Bookmark It

Hide Sites