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Call this 'rescue'?
I advised my aunt to buy an Acer Aspire laptop almost a year back. I must say I am very satisfied with the bang per buck her budget bought her, and am impressed with many of the tiny convenience features Acer had built in to the initial software setup process.
Recently, a system file went missing or got corrupted. Following instructions, I inserted the rescue disk whose instructions which gave me the impression that it would allow me to recover or replace
the missing file without requiring a full restore. Press "C" for continue, and many minutes later, a very nicely packaged recovery program that never gives you an option to bail out, invites you to
customise the copy of Windows that has been copied on to your freshly wiped main partition....
I thank my geeky stars that I had painstakingly moved my aunt's My Documents folder structure and her email to the cryptically named "Acer Data" partition that had been spared by the zealous recovery tool. Thanks to this I "only" had to reinstall all her applications, antivirus, bookmarks, and change the out-of-the-box Windows settings that common sense call for.
Now, I had been aware that many branded machines are shipped with "recovery" versions of Windows. I may even have been a little too cavalier when I hit that fateful "C" button. But when big name companies can take the pains to add on so many post-Windows-setup customisations to change wallpaper and screensavers to branded nonsense, install utilities, all straight out of the box and post-recovery, and even have the sense to create a separate partition that is NOT wiped by the highly restrictive "recovery" routine..
Surely they could also move the standard user data folders to other partitions too? Ideally, of course, the "recovery" CD should first give the user an option to boot in to the very handy recovery shell
(come on, it's part of the OS isn't it??) that provides all the tools necessary to recover from such file corruptions without resorting to the Nuclear Option.
Charitha Ratwatte (Jnr)
Hello,
recovery CDs from PC manufacturers have always been a pain for me. "Techies" like you and me will find that they are not very configurable, and I found that branded systems are simply more fault-prone. The implementation of lots of "lite" software is surely not helping to avoid instability, and many of us would be just as happy to be able to make their own choice of Anti-Virus and DVD decoder software, for example.
The "branded nonsense" start-up screens and screensavers are neither pretty nor useful and serve no other purpose than to keep the user aware that his system was supplied by the grace of computer manufaturer so and so.
Having owned a branded HP system a couple of years ago and going through the pains of restricted recovery for the umpteenth time I decided to get "unlocked" systems only in the future. Unfortunately, it gets harder and harder to get hold of such a system, and for those who do not wish to pay the extra money to a local system builder for assembly there remains only the option to build their PCs themselves. It's more expensive than a "T-line assembled" PC, but definitely pays off in the long run: no loss of warranty if the hardware is upgraded (e.g. RAM, 2nd hard drive), no loss of warranty if one decides to get rid of the (back then) supplied ME in favor of Win2000, let alone the hassle of restoring all the data back from CD to the neatly blanked hard drive after system recovery.
And yes, it was the same situation after an HP recovery in 2000 as you described your recent experience with Acer.
I am sure that someone somewhere suggested improvement, which remained unheard by the big name companies.
Posted by Morgan | February 26, 2006 1:59 PM