Simple guide for new Acer owners.

Hello and welcome to the Acer forum. This guide provides a basic step by step procedure to help you get the most out of your new lappie and avoid the most common pitfalls we see here on the forum on a regular basis.

Step 1. You have just unboxed your brand new lappie. And cant wait to use it . No problem. Make sure the AC adaptor is plugged in and the lappie is running off mains power before you boot the very first time.

Reason being that the battery needs to charge properly and using the battery only on first boot before it has had a chance to charge properly will permanently shorten it's life.

Use the lappie by all means now while the battery is charging. Please remember though - and this is very important: This new lappies battery must charge for a minimum of around 15 hours uninterrupted.

No switching from mains to battery at all please before the 15 hour cycle is complete.

Suggestion: Boot your new lappie as recommended above to see if all is working. Then leave it alone to properly charge the battery. The longer the better for the battery.

Step 2. You would have noticed a prompt from Acer at first boot to burn Recovery Disks. Normally two. The problem could be that you had no blank disks so you ignored the prompt and booted anyway . Still no problem as they can be burnt at any later time PROVIDED YOUR HIDDEN PARTITION IS STILL INTACT.

You might ask: "what is the hidden partition?" It's an area on you HDD called PQ Service and it contains your OS backup, Acer drivers etc. that you can fall back on when all goes pear shaped.

Suggestion: Leave the PQ Service partition alone for now. Just enjoy your new lappie and smile. Don't start reformatting or anything yet until you understand how everything works.

Step 3. You are loving the lappie and now realise you have not burnt the recovery disks. This is how you do it at this (later) stage:
(Empowering Technology must still be installed for this to work)

. Click START then RUN then type msconfig then click the startup tab. Ensure the outlined red processes are ticked as in the top left thumbnail. If not then tick them and reboot.

. The next thing is to open Empowering Technology as in the next thumbnail and click on Acer eRecovery Management.

. You will then be asked for a password as in the next thumbnail. Default is six zeros.

. After entering the password you will be taken to the next thumbnail. Choose "create backup files and change password" as in the thumbnail.

. You are taken to the next thumbnail and choose Burn image to disk.

. Then to the next thumbnail and choose "factory default image"

. And lastly have one DVD ready to burn the image.


And you are done!!!!!


Hope this helps folks

Cheers,
Theo

 

Good idea, one of my cousins got a new laptop a while ago and knew nothing about the backup disks until i told him, he was incensed that he had to do it himself, but he then did it nonetheless.

 

Hope the guide is a bit clearer now...

Cheers,
Theo

 

I wish someone had posted this simple guide before I screwed (or shortened) my batteries potential lifespan. Did not know then.....