Acer Aspire V5

I bought my Acer a little over a year ago. In January I upgraded to Windows 8.1 beta. My computer after a week or two would start saying "preparing repair". Or I would have the Acer logo and the dots just spinning. Operating system not found. I sent it in for repair and shortly after it came back, just in time for the warranty to be up, it started saying driver failing. Now it is doing the same thing as before and warranty doesn't cover it. I don't feel wrong in saying I think they do this purposely so you now either pay to have it fixed or buy a new one. I can't afford either. I will never buy another Acer product. Id rather spend $1500 on something that will last than $800 on something made to fail.

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JackE

Sorry to hear this. If you haven't tried to do so already, I recommend that you try to restore your system to factory settings by following this video but selecting the recovery option that retains instead of deletes your data files.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqgYe7OcLhA

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

I did the recovery about a month ago. Now I can't even get past the acer screen at all.

JackE

>>>it started saying driver failing>>>

Did it read "driver" or "drive" failing?

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

Yes. At one point.

karolynnpaige

About a month after it was returned.

JackE

Yes, but did it read "driver" as in ending with the letter "r"?

Or did it read "drive" as in ending in the letter "e"?

It makes a difference.

If it was a "driver", it could simply have meant a corrupted software file. But if it was a "drive", it likely meant that a hard drive failure was eminent.

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

St500lt012-9ws142 It just came back from being repaired.

JackE

I do not understand your reply to my question on whether the word "driver" or "drive" was failing.

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

I don't remember. What would be the difference? The number is the one that was failing.

JackE

Googling that number and the message you think you saw indicates that it was a Seagate 500MB hard drive trying to warn you that it would soon fail. This usually means that the hard drive detected one of more of its disk platters was getting closer and closer to the head that reads the info on the platters. Eventually, when the two touch, that's known as a crash and the hard drive is usually toast.

In the future, when you see a warning message like this, you should immediately backup your files even if the machine seems to boot up OK because a drive failure is eminent.

A new hard drive is less than $50 from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss/185-8487612-4044024?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=St500lt012-9ws142%20

Installation is a fairly easy DIY task. Just take off the back cover. Remove a few screws and unplug the old drive.

But since your old drive is toast, you need to go to the Acer store and purchase erecovery disks to re-load Windows onto the new drive.

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

So im just guessing it was my whole hard drive. The one just guessing"fixed".

karolynnpaige

Yeah. So basically they just fixed the minimum and waited for my warranty to run out so i would be paying more. My computer has never been dropped, anything spilled on it, and has virus protection. My windows firewall i noticed would never come on i am guessing since i had it. This happened twice. I will not be buying another Acer. I am disappointed. This was my first computer. I would say my mistake was not buying an extended warranty but even if I had I would have still been paying to send it in repeated times because the hard drives don't work in the first place. Thank you for the information.

JackE

BTW, if you decide to install a new drive from Amazon, the charge for Acer recovery disks to load Windows on it is really quite reasonable. So you might find that the overall cost of getting your machine up and running again somewhat palatable at this point.

Jack E/NJ

karolynnpaige

There is no room in my budget to get this fixed. It should not have broken in the first place. I expected more when I paid almost $800 for it in March last year. The only extra income I get is from doing online surveys or buying things online cheaper than I can in-store. It was my biggest help to have a computer which is why my internet and phone are paid up for a year. For you it may be as simple as getting a new hard drive. For me, it means taking something I need and going without until I can pay off the balance because I had to order a new hard drive for a computer that was supposed to work and function as long as it was taken care of. I can now see why it was the cheapest on the shelf. I know it is not your fault, but I find this is a company that does not care about the customers, only the profit they can make. It is disappointing. If you could, please tell me what would be an actual worthwhile computer to buy next year so I do not make the same mistake twice? That would be a much better help. Thank you.

JackE

Hard drives are commodities like many computer parts and manufactured by relatively few companies. Thus the exact same drive models can be routinely used by many different assemblers of almost all consumer-oriented computers. So you could run into the exact same problem with other assemblers. Though it happens less frequently than 10 years ago, hard drives still crash unfortunately and can do so abruptly at any time even without an early iminent-failure warning message of any kind.

My only advice is to try to determine whether or not Acer-repair actually replaced the Seagate drive with a new one. If new, there may or may not be some wiggle room on getting another new one to install.

Jack E/NJ

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