The Acer Guy

Picked this story up today and thought I’d make some sense of it before someone else decides to blow it out of proportion.

Acer has taken the courageous decision to join other manufacturers in ordering a battery recall after previously saying that its batteries were not at risk.

Although no Acer notebooks have had any battery-related problems, the decision to join forces with other PC manufacturers in conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is clear evidence that pre-emptive safety measures are a major priority for Acer, no matter how small the risk is, and no matter how good Acer’s safety record is.

The battery recall is currently only valid for the US, and Acer has set up a dedicated website with clear instructions on which notebooks are affected and how to proceed with the recall.

For reference, the affected notebooks sold in the US are:

TravelMate Series Beginning with:242x, 320x, 321x, 330x, 422x, 467x, 561x, C20x.
Aspire Series Beginning with:556x, 560x, 567x, 930x, 941x, 980x.

It is important to note that as different markets often have different components and/or models, this is not a global recall.

Having said that, on the local sites, under Service and Support, there is a section dedicated to the “Voluntary Battery Replacement Program” giving more detailed information about the particular country-specific initiatives.

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Here’s an interesting fact: Nearly half of the visitors to The Acer Guy are using Windows Vista.

I am assuming these Vista visits have a lot to do with the surge in interest over the Orbicam problems under this same operating system. And, as these Orbicams “stopped working”, I’m assuming all these people upgraded from XP.

Well, if you are in the 48.28% of visitors, can you let me know how the upgrade went? Were you brave enough to do it on your own or did you use Acer’s Express Upgrade?

Just for fun, here’s the OS split:

Windows Vista - 48.28 %
Windows XP - 47.52 %
Windows 2000 - 1.72 %
Mac OS - 0.95 %
Unknown - 0.57 %
Windows 2003 - 0.57 %
Windows 98 - 0.19 %
Windows CE - 0.19 %

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Well yesterday marked a few milestones.

First of all, the news that Acer had become the third-largest PC vendor in the world.

Then, The Acer Guy managed 100 site visits for the very first time. I know it’s not much but I’m proud of it.

Finally, the Swicki counter for “Orbicam Driver” hit the 1000-mark which is 7.5 times the amount of search requests for the second-most popular term (Acer support). If I get time later on today I’ll post an updated chart.

While I’m on the subject, Joel’s reply to my “Orbicam driver for Windows Vista” post made me scour the Acer sites looking for help.

What you need to click on is the “Service & Support” button at the bottom of your local site (UK, IT, FR, DE, US etc).

The European sites take you to a different page than the Americas and I personally prefer it but hey, if you get what you’re looking for, who cares right?

Alternatively, if you’re in a rush and don’t want to go through the support pages and just want the drivers, try these direct links to the official driver pages:

Americas driver downloads: click here
European driver downloads: click here

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Now here’s something to celebrate.

Just read this news flash over at MLive.com that puts Acer AHEAD of Lenovo for the first time.

The title and focus of the article is about HP’s 4 point lead over Dell but the real news (for me anyway) happens a little further down:

Under IDC’s measure, China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. tied Taiwan-based Acer Inc. for third place in worldwide shipments, each achieving a 6.7 percent slice of the market. Gartner’s found Acer with a slight lead over Lenovo for the first time, garnering a 6.8 percent share compared to Lenovo’s 6.3 percent.

Wonder how long we’ll have to wait for official confirmation?

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Notebook Review has an interesting article that my aggregator picked up this morning.

According to the article, Acer is about to “ditch” the Windows XP operating system.

70% of Acer’s notebook shipments in Taiwan are now using the Windows Vista operating system according to Acer’s president of marketing for Taiwan, Calvin Chang. Chang also said that Acer will no longer be shipping notebooks with Windows XP after Q3.

Is the time coming for all us XP die-hards to call it a day?

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Sorry to steal the headline but this post on Menafn shows that Acer rcorded a YoY growth of 50% in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, and before any of you accuse me of distorting the maths, the article goes on to say:

The IT vendor is still the number one supplier for notebooks, with a market share of 26.8%.

Not surprisingly, notebooks take the King’s share (sic) of sales, with 138,729 units sold in the Kingdom, a year-on-year growth of 42.1% from 2005.

These results will allow Acer to maintain its historical strong presence at this year’s Saudi GITEX with dedicated stands focusing on three key areas: convergence, mobility and enterprise.

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Saw an interesting post about the new Altos easyStore today.

Although it’s described as an “intelligent” network storage solution for small office and home network environments, I definitely think there is some room for home applications here.

I mean, the easyStore offers up to 2TB of storage capacity through 4 high capacity drives, it can be configured via a web interface for RAID configuration and supports Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems which must surely make it interesting for vlog posters (Justin copycats anyone?), serial digital media collectors (I’m becoming one) and HD film fanatics that just can’t get enough storage.

According to TechDigest, the 4TB easyStore is available for £849 plus VAT (or £997).

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More Vista worries here.

I have noticed a HUGE demand for “Acer OrbiCam driver” in my swicki. We’re talking a LOT of people: 759 searches (number 1 spot) compared to 130 for the second-placed “customer support” request.

I have found this link to DriverZone.com for the Acer OrbiCam driver. According to this page, the supported systems are:

Operating Systems: Win 98, Win 98SE, Win ME, Win 2K, Win XP, Win Server 2K3, Win Vista

Hope this helps if you’re in trouble.

UPDATE 1 (request): For all of you reading this article I need to know if the solution at DriverZone.com actually works. Can you leave a reply and let me know?

UPDATE 2 (request): Same thing applies to the Device Manager solution.

UPDATE 3: Scroll down for what might be a solution you didn’t know you had… (thanks Richard) or save yourself the time and click here.

UPDATE 4: I have closed comments to this post as the argument has moved on. Please read this post for a solution. Thanks.

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Got a mail from Bill yesterday asking help on a Vista upgrade problem.

Bill’s problem was that during the upgrade from Windows Xp to Vista, he “lost” GridVista and was no longer able to re-install it as his version of GridVista was no longer compatible.

Now I am not a software engineer, nor am I related to customer support but Bill’s misadventure got me thinking how bad/good the Vista upgrade process has been for other Acer users (and any other manufacturers for that matter).

Did it go smoothly? Did you run the Windows Vista Advisor before you installed and were the results accurate? Most of all, what, if anything, did you lose or gain in the process?

Again, this is not intended as a support page (you should check the Service and Support link at the bottom of your local Acer site to see which products have driver upgrades available), more as a testing ground to see if it was good for you too?

BTW, I’m still on XP.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of people visiting The Acer Guy after performing some interesting queries in Google. The How to switch Gridvista off article was my first response to these particular requests, today I’m going to answer another.

I’m going to make this a new feature of The Acer Guy as it’s the sort of dialogue I value the most. Real people. Real problems.

In fact I’ve set up a new category - Question corner - for this very purpose and will do my best to answer the good ones as and when I spot them. It might keep me one step behind user requests but at least I’ll have solved it for the next guy…

Today’s query was simple: “does acer orbicam contains a integrated microphone”? for which, at the time of writing, The Acer Guy is ranked 15, apparently

Anyway, the answer is no, they don’t. I know they are made by Logitech and run the same software as Logitech cameras which might you think they are similar to Logitech integrated webcams but they’re not.

I’m writing this on a TravelMate 6460 and the microphone is located beneath my left thumb, between the Windows and function keys.

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