Formal complaint - Acer not being honerable - recovery Incident:

StephenLaw · 2015-08-19T10:45:52+00:00

I had a problem upgrading to Windows 10 and lost my Windows 8.1 recovery partition when making extra space available as the ES1-111m does not have enough free space for the Windows 10 procedure. A factory reset no longer takes me back to Windows 8.1 I need a set of windows 8.1 recovery disks so I can re-load Windows 8.1…

JordanB

If you've tried both the single language 8.1 and the "regular" 8.1, and it didn't work, then that must be the case since you have bing version.

I don't know Acer's point of view, but I have to guess they feel like they sold you a perfectly working windows 8.1 computer. And they gave you free recovery software so you could make a factory default backup. And a quick start guide that recommended that you do so, As a courtesy, they've provided windows 10 drivers. They aren't making money from providing windows 10 drivers for windows 8.1 or windows 7. They're losing money. They lose money every time they have to provide support for a computer that came with windows 7 or windows 8.1., because they have to pay support people. Why would they want to provide free support or free factory default ISO files or USBs on a product that wasn't even sold with Windows 10?

Again, that's my opinion. I have no idea what Acer's opinion is.

StephenLaw

Acer has made available a list of machines that will be supported on Windows 10 and the Acer ES1-111m is on it. My machine is only 3 months old. I did make a recovery backup to USB, but once I realised that I needed to make the OS partition bigger to accomodate Windows 10 and I needed a USB to do the Windows ugrade, I thought I might as well use the recovery USB key, as i would not need it anly longer and it was the only one I had. I was also not aware that I could allow the standard background windows download to overflow on to a USB key, thus elieviating the SSD Capacity issue for the Windows 10 upgrade. This is where I probably went wrong.

The release of Windows 10 is done silently in the background and the small SSD starts to fill very quickly and I thought what I was doing would eliviate a failure condidition rather than create one.

I think there are a number of Customer service issues here, regardless if I out of naivity followed the wrong path.

Customer Service is all about Customer retention and selling more to existing customers and building a reputation.

Acer has by way of registration, access to the email adressses of the Customers who own ES1-111m machanies with the small 32gb SSD, and they could of put out something upfront before the Windows 10 upgrade in terms of potential issues and procedure - e.g they had a opportunity to be proactive in improving Customer service and reducing support costs.

My other point also remains in that after discussion openly and clearly with Acer Support what I had done and what had gone wrong, and for them to say in one email they would send me some free recovery disks and then days latter follow up to say the will not be sending the disks and that I will have to pay for them is not good Customer Service.

I only use this machine for web browsing, so I can still use it with Windows 10 un-activated, who knows the Windows 8.1 Bing ISO might well be made available at some point in the future as there are many other people who are suffering problems upgrading Windows 8.1 Bing to Windows 10 on 32gb SSD machines.

By the way, I could probably extract the licence key from the BIOS via something like RWEVERYTHING but without a Windows 8.1 Bing ISO I remain stuffed.

JordanB

I understand you point of view and you make some good points. That deletion of your Windows 8.1 recovery drive was a killer though. If it makes you feel any better, I have made much worse computer related mistakes in the last 20 years and it has cost me hundreds of dollars. I still make them. Not that long ago, I let a $50 VISA rebate card expire on me. Nothing like throwing money away. Smiley Wink Good luck.

StephenLaw

Finally succeeded in getting a Windows 10 Home install on my ES1-111m – fully activated.

I acquired a .img file containing a Windows 8.1 Bing ISO from the dark side of the web.
I burnt the .img file to a DVD.
I installed Windows 8.1 with Bing successfully from the DVD using a portable DVD Drive (at no time was a key requested though I did have to go online to activate Windows 8.1 with Bing via Ethernet).
Built a Windows 10 Home USB via Rufus (FAT32).
Did an inside install of Windows 10 Home.
Windows 10 Home System on ES1-111m checked and found to be fully activated.

Note 0. If you are prompted for a key as part of the install then you probably have the wrong ISO, as the install process gets the key from the BIOS. You can get the Windows activation key from the BIOS using RWEVERYTHING but that is not required, but you can do it if your curious.

Note 1. I tried to build a Windows 8.1 with Bing USB using the .img via Rufus. Rufus insisted that it create a NTFS format USB. The problem here was the UEFI bios will only boot from a USB Key in FAT32 format.

Note 2. Booting from the DVD worked fine, obviously selecting USB DVD in the boot options menu.

Note 3. It has taken me in excess of 60 Hours effort to get to this point.

Note 4. Hat tip to JordanB for pointing me in the right direction.

Note 5. There is an opportunity for both Acer and Microsoft to improve their customer service here?

Note 6. Never mess with your partitions or you will invalidate your Acer warranty.

Note 7. In future I will always make a recovery disk in DVD Format, that will help me keep it.

Cory-Acer

Hi StephenLaw,

I just want to step in and apologize for your experience. Obviously, the most concerning thing to me is that you felt Acer committed to providing a set of recovery media and then decided not to provide one for free, but rather charge. I hope that this wasn't intentional on our end and was a result of a misunderstanding. I've sent information to the region you've dealt with so that they can do a review.

I'm glad you were able to resolve your issue though and you're right in many ways, we're always looking to improve our service and our communication. Every OS launch has some growing pains unfortunately, and I'm not sure we can always be 100% prepared. I've been with Acer since before the Vista launch in 2007 so I've gotten to see how much more effort has gone into each release of new OS (by Microsoft and Acer) and how much smoother these launches are now versus the Vista launch.

Cory