A friend of mine purchased an Acer Computer which is still under warranty. Recently the hard drive failed and after numerous calls, a techo called out wnd replaced the drive as part of the home service that Acer Provide under warranty. The hard drive originally came with windows installed as part of the purchase agreement. I License key issued ad attached to the PC. When the hard drive was replaced, nothing was on the hard drive. No operating system at all!!! I had a licensed spare copy of Windows Home edition which I was NOt using any longer so I decided to place it on his computer. Low and behold every I tried to install, I got The BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. Later I was informed by Acer that they have a special disc set that installs on their computers. A copy of this 3 disc set was NOT given to the purchaser. Eventually Acer again sent a techo out and installed their version of windows on the PC. NO discs were left with the purchaser. I wonder how he will restore his operating system wnen a hard disk fails again and the computer is out of warranty. DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEAS WHY THESE NAME BRANDS ARE ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH NOT PROVIDING A RESTORE DISC SET. It is obvious that Acer need to be called in every time to repair the PC when it is out of warranty. Imagine the costs. Any Ideas on how to go about getting past this stupid Idea which would allow a person to restore the operating system which has been legally paid for??? The PC is an Acer Aspire E700. Thanks in advance to all who reply.

All recent ACER's I have used have an utility to create the restore disks, on first bootup.

Give that idiot techno a call - tell him politely that if he doesn't replace the HD with XP on it you will report his sloppiness to the head of Acer. i_Xp/VistaUser

Echo both of posts 1 & 2... You can also create a recovery CD(s)/DVD (or at least an image of the drive at the time) at most times if I recall correctly...? It's in the Acer Arcade utility; backup: allows an option to create an Image... And if the worst comes to it... one can buy for very pennies overall a recovery CD (or CDs) for most Acer laptops. But first lean very hard at Acer-land...

If the install included the copying of the i386 directory and the OEMBIOS files to the hard drive then it is possible to use these along with the winnt.sif file to create an XP install CD for that specific laptop make. However that would not cover the drivers. An image would. Utilities like drive Image, Acronis, Norton Ghost and there are also some free versions (see thefreecountry.com) would allow you to create a backup image. A CD is always useful for when you want to carry out a repair install or repair recovery. This is not possible with an image. If I was the owner I would do both. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.