Acer Hard Drive Recovery

If they'd have just used Linux, Acer hard drive recovery would be easy.  A bunch of lawyers have gotten involved though… Now, how smart do you feel Acer?

I was going to tweet this, but I couldn’t shrink it down to 140 characters… 

I was over on Acer’s website  there looking for something else and saw a message about free thumb drives, or a mouse, or something.  I ended up reading about an Acer Hard Drive Recovery Class Action Lawsuit.  It sounds like Acer doesn’t provide restore CDs (I think only Dell does) which is normal, but it also sounds like their recovery partition doesn’t quite work.  Something about if your hard drive actually breaks (not just Windows screwing up, but an actual hardware failure) you can’t recover to a new drive.

The gist of it is this: If you’ve got a laptop that meets the criteria (bought it between 2005 and 2011) you’re in the class.  If you’ve never had trouble, you get a free cd.  If you had trouble and had to call tech support, you get to pick something out of the prize box.  A flash drive, a mouse, or a webcam.

Now, I don’t know if this is an Acer or a Microsoft problem.  I suspect it’s some of both.  There was probably some new licensing thing tied to hardware and Acer’s tool couldn’t install Windows on “uncertified” drives.  I’ve no idea, really, this is just what I think might have happened.  Some people lost data as a result, although that’s really their own fault.  There was some mention on the web page of lost pictures and such, but I can’t say that I feel all that bad for the claimants.  There’s such a thing as backups.  If you don’t make them regularly, well…

I thought I’d get a prize too, but I never made a call to support.  See, Windows only ran for about ten seconds on my laptop when I got it in 2010.  The bios was set to boot from the hard drive, not the cd rom.  If it had initially been set for cd rom, this puppy would never have seen Windows at all.  So while I’d love another thumb drive (unless it’s a Sandisk, then you can keep it) I can’t get a free one from Acer.  I didn’t have the recovery problem.

When you stop and think about it, nobody else would have had it either if Acer had been shipping their laptops with Linux pre installed on them instead of Windows.  There aren’t any licensing problems, so it shouldn’t matter what hard drive is being used in a restoration.  Backups can be scheduled regularly (to some cloud service Acer could provide for a very small fee) with cron, the OS probably wouldn’t break in the first place, etc, etc.

In addition to saying “Come on, Acer. Get with the program” I’d also like to share how happy I am with my Acer Aspire 5517 running Linux.  She’s a BEAUT!

Addendum — it’s now 3/4/2014, and I’ve no longer got the 5517.  There’s a young lady living with my family who runs it.  I gave her a fresh Ubuntu install and havnen’t heard much since.  I’m running Mint on another Acer though, an Aspire 7750.  One hard drive quit, but that was only after a face plant when one of the cats knocked it off the counter…