7741z hard drive crashed after 10 months, cannot install drivers on new hard drive.

I bought a 7741z-4839 on June 16, 2011 from Tiger Direct. (First--- and last--- mistake). In the summer of 2012 the hard drive crashed. My fault or not who knows. I bought a new hard drive. Installed it. Installed a GENUINE copy of Win 7 Home Premium (came from MS website). Put in the key on the bottom of the laptop.

All is well and fine except....

I cannot install one single solitary driver. NOT ONE of the drivers from the Acer website work. I've installed them in more ways than sunday. (Is that a term? If not, I just made it up).

I cannot believe I have a $450 paperweight sitting in front of me. I am not paying someone $150 to install drivers. All I know is I'm about to smash this thing into a million peices and send it back in a cardboard box to Acer Headquarters.

I can't call acer support because they wouldn't help me to begin with because it's not under warranty. All they kept saying was, "It's not under warranty we can't help you". Then I said, "But can I..." and all I got was cut off and was told, "We can't help you it's not under warranty". That was a week after the manufacture warranty expired after trying for two months to get some answers.

I am calling Acer headquarters tomorrow IDC if it was bought thru Tiger Direct, Acer should stand by their products if they want to keep customers.

Oh I forgot--- you're all probably thinking why didn't I buy an extended warranty. Because I live in NY I WASN'T ALLOWED!! Nice right?

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finlux

Hi FallenAnjel

That's rotten!

I can't understand why none of the drivers work on the Acer website - bizarre. Can I make a suggestion? Buy an Acer Recovery disk - here, It has all the drivers preinstalled, and will return your laptop to the day you first bought it. Price is around $20 or so...

There is even a phone number listed, if you get any problems, so you can talk to a human!

FallenAnjel

Thank you finlux, I will check that out! I will post back with an update.

edit:: actually, I'm calling them tomorrow first before dropping $20. I shouldn't really have to pay for a recovery disk. There's no reason why the drivers cannot be installed.

I'm thoroughly convinced that, just like places like Home Dumpo and Lows, (mispelling intentional), electronics are made with different specs for certain outlets. I bet this is why I cannot get drivers for this. It's prob som special edition thing that was only available at Tiger Direct. But we'll see. I'll let u know what happens.

[edited to comply with guidelines]

finlux

Well, good luck!

$20 is cheap compared to a few hundred for a new PC Smiley Wink

FallenAnjel

I agree but I shouldn't have to be spending anything at all because windows is installed fine.

I wonder if there's a way to compare the drivers from the disk to the ones on the website. Except I don't know anything about programming and all that fancy stuff lol.

finlux

If you check the "Properties" of the driver it should tell you the version number. You could compare them with the ones listed on the website (although they could be updated ones anyway....!)

FallenAnjel

After three calls to corporate and talking to three different "customer support" reps (who were not in some God-forsaken country), A REALLY nice woman named Jennifer mentioned "Customer satisfaction" (a phrase I haven't heard since I started this fiasco 2 years ago) and transferred me to Charles who walked me thru installing a driver..... just ONE, but it was Ethernet and it works and I can access the internet! I'm still trying to get the PCI and WLAN drivers installed and he suggested also re-installing ACHI and AMT Drivers as well.

There's a possibility the wlan card could be bad, but I don't see how since only the hard drive crashed. I can get one for $10 so I may buy a new one but for now, I"m happy with wired. (It's faster anyway lol).

At first I was offered $249 for out of warranty repair but they would lower it to $175, then "Jennifer" said $125. Still not paying.

It pays to be persistant!!! It really is all about customer satisfaction. It's not like I expected the world. I just needed some help either installing the drivers or figuring out why the drivers wouldn't install. A company should really stand by their products if they're the 4th largest notebook manufacturer in the US.

Now since I only put a 200gb hard drive in here just to get this working, I get to do this all again when I buy a bigger hard drive because 200gb would be filled in a few weeks. LOL.

finlux

Great news, FallenAnjel Smiley Happy

jeankath

I'm having the same problem but I need to reinstall all software. A computer co formatted hard drive and reinstalled Win 7 but I have nothing that came preloaded on PC. I am confused on how to do it without reinstalling Win 7 again. Is there a way to do it? I have all discs form Acer for eRecovery action. just have had bad luck in the last month with anything electronic........ any help appreciated.

finlux

Hi jeankath!

One of your disks should have the pre-installed applications & drivers on it. You will need to insert this in your drive & install from there.

Alternatively, go to Acer support for your region, click "Drivers & Manuals" and enter the details of your PC. Select your OS, and click on the applications tab.

Hope this helps!

jeankath

Thank you I will try that. This is the laptop I do all my work on and its lonely for some qwerty tapping! Smiley Happy I did put them in the drive to see but it might as well been a foreign language. I'll see and post if I run in to problems.

jeankath

ok I have 5 discs labels are as follows: Language Disc, System disc 1 of 1, Recovery discs 1-3. I don't see applications on the first two, kind of scared to put in recovery discs, can I look at those files as well in windows explorer?