The Acer Guy

Haven’t written anything for a while because I’ve been behind the scenes preparing for the next wave of Acer products.

I’m finishing the text for the mini-sites that will then have to be rapidly translated into a million languages so the pressure’s on. Never a dull moment…

We’re thinking of doing our own videos this time although in true AcerGuy style, I wish I could get you guys out there to make your own.

Tell you what, if you send me a video of you saying what you’d like Acer to make, if you’re right I’ll edit them into one long string of requests that we could use as a viral video.

You could do it with your OrbiCam, or sign up to Seesmic, or YouTube or wherever you like.

The sentence you have to finish is this:

You’re going to have to be quick as it’s just around the corner but it’d be amazing to see the results.

Any offers..? ideas..?

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Over the past year and a half, I have been on the receiving end of literally thousands of technical questions.

Believe it or not, I am not a technical guy. No I’m not kidding. I LOVE technology, but it doesn’t take much for it to leave me literally clueless. But Simone is, fortunately, and that means we are running an almost 100% success rate with everything you throw at us. I’m lucky to have him on board.

One of the things I have always wanted to do was a “DO THIS FIRST” guide. A sort of quick start checklist designed to make sure you’re never left with a dead machine.

I mentioned it to Simone and he was pretty enthusiastic too.

The result of that 5-minute chat over coffee was this intelligent list of things to do the moment you get your Acer out of the box.

This is a community. We’re here to share our experiences so if there’s something missing, please mention it in the comments. With a bit of luck, and with your help this guide could save thousands of pounds/dollars/euros in unnecessary repair bills…

So, without further ado, let’s start the ball rolling with a couple of things you need to do right now in order to make your Acer experience as smooth as possible:

1. Burn the Acer Factory backup onto a blank CD/DVD.

2. Install and Run an Antivirus program before you do anything else! – If you don’t have one yet, check out Norton Internet Security 2008.

3. Run Windows / Microsoft updates for both Windows and Office (Microsoft Update automatically downloads and installs updates for all Microsoft products on your computer). If you don’t have Office 2007 or if you don’t want it, first remove it and install the Office Productivity application you prefer and update with hotfix if available

4. Get to know the Acer eRecovery suite.

Of all the hundreds and thousands of Acer notebooks sold worldwide, I reckon somewhere around 99% do not use this life-saving software feature, and it’s built right into the computer!

What eRecovery does is to manage your software configuration, drivers and applications so that should something go wrong you can return your computer or single driver or single application to its original state in a couple of steps WITHOUT having to deal with Acer support.

So how does it work?

eRecovery restores the original content of your C: partition to the original Acer preload system with applications. You then have the option of burning this “Personal Backup” onto DVDs and use this to recover your machine instead of the Factory backup (which stores only the original Acer content).

With a Personal Backup, the eRecovery engine saves the content of your C: partition (for example Vista + Programs + all other content in this partition) into “hidden” files on D:
The advantage of eRecovery is that you can re-do your Personal Backup as many times as you like with any configuration, so that as you install more software, you can keep your “restore software” updated as well.

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 1
Every time you run this personal backup and save a new configuration, you overwrite the previous one. This means that the only way to store different backup versions is to burn them on DVDs each time you run eRecovery.

This way you can have different DVDs with different versions of Personal Backups and you can choose what to restore when you have to use it.

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 2
Of course the basic engine NEEDS to be the same, so this works ONLY if you have your original Acer preload working fine. eRecovery does not work if you delete / format the machine first!

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 3
eRecovery Personal Backup and eRecovery in general works only with content on the C: partition!

When Acer eRecovery restores the factory backup (default Acer preload) it re-writes ONLY the C: partition, all files on the D: partition are NOT touched in any way

When eRecovery runs the Personal backup it saves ONLY files on the C: partition, not on D: !!!
So if you have your Company backup file somewhere in D: this WILL BE NOT SAVED in the “Personal Backup”

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 4
Nothing from the D: partition is saved with eRecovery but DO NOT SAVE EVERYTHING ONTO C: just to make sure that eRecovery Personal backup will save everything during the backup process. For personal files you should use another backup system.

Remember that the Acer Default Factory backup will generally require 1 or 2 DVDs, depending if Office 2007 is installed or not, so if you add more software you need more space to create the backup (on the D: partition) and more time to burn into many DVDs !!

It’s a vicious circle. The more you add on C: the more space you need on D: and the more DVDs you need to backup and the more time you need to restore everything…

The best way to do it is to separate your Operating System (Vista + programs) from your files. The Operating system and programs are on C: and are used to determine the back-up point with eRecovery. Your files can be stored on D: and backed up separately onto DVDs.

This way should you need to fully restore your computer you can use the eRecovery Personal Backup first (two DVDs = quick process), then restore all your files from another storage solution.

Got any more? Feel free to add your own and if they’re good enough, I’ll put them on the list.

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This time round I answer four questions:

1. What’s the Windows Experience Index?
2. What does a (real) DVD look like on the 8920?
3. What is the keyboard like?
4. How loud can it go?

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my hands on a VoIP Bluetooth phone or a 6920 but I’m still looking for them so this ain’t over just yet.

If you have any more questions I’m happy to go in there again and try and answer them. Just don’t make them too technical as a) these are sample models which means they are not full production spec and b) I’d rather YOU publish your own reviews once you’ve bought one…

Anyway, without further ado… here is the latest installment of the Gemstone Blue.

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Well this is fun.

Didn’t think anyone would have bothered looking at that last one but you did and like all the best laid plans, I left some stuff out…

So yesterday I went back there to finish what I started. At least for now.

Any guesses about the music?

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This is a bit of a giggle really. Don’t take it too seriously.

I promise I’ll do better in future.

Anyway, the other day I was looking for videos of the Gemstone Blue to post here. I mean my Google alerts have been firing off a couple of times a day ever since the launch event but apart from articles based on stuff I wrote, there’s very little to actually look at.

So I went out an made my own.

OK, I know it’s an awful video - the lighting is terrible and this one was a prototype so the specs were all wrong but I had fun making it and that’s all that counts isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Who knows if they’ll let me back in to make more.

Whatever. Enjoy!

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Once again credit to Jeremiah for this.

You either love them or hate them.

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What do you get when you cross street culture with the IT world?

You get weird pieces like this. Or is it a tag? No maybe it’s just a throw up…

Whatever. I personally can’t see this appearing soon on, say, an Aspire iDea..

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OK, so YouTube had a major setback last week thanks to Viacom’s reluctance to allow Google’s latest acquisition continue to stream its content.

But that doesn’t mean it’s lost its claim as one of the top places to find stuff that interests the likes of you and me.

I don’t know where you’re reading from but where I live, Acer doesn’t air TV ads, so it was great to uncover this one for the TravelMate C100 tablet.

The thing I really like is the comment underneath the video (on the YouTube site). ” Looks like it has a long bat life”. Brilliant critique

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