Acer Desktop Update

Well I've had a lot of fun with my new desktop, not.

After a couple of weeks, the system started to fail. The screen would garble up after about 20 minutes and the system would freeze and when hard booted up, do the same again until the system had cooled down. It was a suspected blown graphics card and should have been a simple fix but it wasn't. What happened, I went through technical support via Acer online web support. This went on for a couple of weeks, being told to do things I had already done to see what the actual problem was, which involved a system restore, re-install graphics drivers, check graphics card and memory were seated properly and to try other monitors. Not of that fixed the problem. Though to be fair, the person replying was polite and did respond in a pretty reasonable time.

He was just unable to provide me a contact number or arrange any help there after. The contact number to arrange me sending in the machine at first was disconnected. Later in the week, it had a pre-recorded message to go online and hung up on you rather than putting you on hold to speak to a rep as instructed in the email support.

Fixmyacer.com is the website to go, which wasn't where I was pointed towards initially. Anyway, I arranged the repair and went to UPS for ship it back to them, out to Texas, which cost me $40. I really should have just bought myself a new graphics card, but that's beside the point, it was under warranty.

A month later, I get my system back, the repair report said they had re-seated the graphics card. Low and behold, twenty minutes after I booted my system, it failed again. It would seem that they ignored my repair report that the system fails after 20 minutes.

Email support got me no where, just told to send my machine back. I wasn't impressed, another $40 and a month for some knob shite to not fix it again? Just slightly pissed and unable to get anywhere.

I first found The Acer Guy who seems to want to help and has a great blog about what is happening with the company, but he's based in Europe. He did after I emailed him offer to try and help.

I also went to the Better Business Bureau and they were fantastic. I lodged my complaint, they contacted Acer, and within a half hour of that, someone from Acer called me up to arrange for a prioritised fix on my system, which is within 5-10 days rather than the 2-4 weeks. They also paid for Fed-Ex shipping, I just had to drop my machine off at the local Fedex store.

The system arrived yesterday and they did replace the faulty graphics card and so far, seems to be running well again.

The details you'll need to make the BBB complaint, to the company US headquarters, which is in California, so you would file at that BBB chapter -

Company details:

Complaint against : Acer America Corp

Acer America (USA only)
Acer America Corporation
333 West San Carlos Street
Suite 1500
San Jose, CA 95110
(408) 533-7700

Mudbox 2009

Autodesk has been releasing some sneak peak videos of Mudbox 2009 which look awesome and some really handy new features.


The old Siggragh preview is also worth a peak as it shows a lot of things in action.

Boston Post Mortem

The IGDA's local chapter, the Boston Post Mortem September monthly meeting was sponsored this month by GamerDNA so a big hand of thanks to them for the talk, the food and the free drinks.

Jon Radoff who heads the organisation gave the talk, which was about gaming trends covering the big hits of COD4, GTA4 etc and the world of MMO's.

It was interesting to see how Rock Band faired against Guitar Hero in the long term in the amount of usage spent by players.

There was a lack of coverage on the indie market which I felt was a shame because it would have been interesting to hear how indie developers fair against similar competition - How Castle Crashers compares with other indie released games in regards to sales and level of actual game time players put in, because it is another realm to the large marketed big budget games, and for many studios, this kind of data would be far more valuable.

The venue, the Skellig is a charming venue though with a good bar and space at the back for the event to take place, but these events are busy and seating is limited, this means it can be difficult to actually ask questions in the Q&A session after the talk. Jon was willing to answer questions privately, I just didn't think that benefitted the audience as much as it could.

The crowd was made up with a good mix of professionals in the industry, the location being fairly central and with a lot of free parking just behind the pub helping out a lot in this regard. There were a large number of students or recent grads from a local games art school there, they were interesting to talk with, but did make networking and job hunting more diluted for those already in the industry.

Baby Carriers

Now that the baby is four and a half months old, with my mother over for a visit, we decided to get a baby carrier as it seemed like a handy thing for lugging the baby around if we didn't want to use the push chair.

After trying out quite a few from various baby stores and from some friends, we decided on getting the Lascal M1 carrier. The price doesn't appear to have any variation from website to website or store to store.

Well worth it after having it a few weeks. It's easy to put on, nice and comfy to wear and the baby loves it, to be able to look out at things or to snuggle up and sleep while your out doing your grocery shop.

It's so convenient to use when going to the market or parks that don't have smooth pathways as well as grocery shopping, not having to worry about the baby seat fitting in the trolly etc.

This carrier is well made, very sturdy, easy to clean and made with soft bamboo fibres that don't chafe and breathes nicely in the heat, which was a problem we found with the cheaper ones that we tried out, because having a baby right on your chest who puts out a lot of heat isn't particularly comfortable when your out and about in the heat.

Home Desktop System

Well it was time to finally replace the home desktop, so I got Acer Aspire M5100, which is the spec says has- AMD Phenom X4 9500 Quad Core Processor 2.2GHz, 3GB DDR2, 500 SATA II, DVDRW, ATI HD2400 Pro, Gigabit LAN, Vista Home Premium.

It's not a bad budget desktop for $600 you do get a lot of machine, but my thoughts on it -

It should have included SP1 at the very least, as there were loads of windows updates to do.

I've uninstalled nearly all the acer software except NTI burner, which ain't to bad for free though it isn't very good for everything as it doesn't burn images, so a freebie from filehippo was found, the rest of the software was rubbish except the back up stuff.

Vista found my Samsung printer and set that up easily enough and getting the network dongle working was pretty easy too, and it automatically set my tablet up, but it was rubbish until you got the proper drivers for it.

Over all, the system ain't bad and certainly good value for money.

Pluses -

• It's uber quiet, which is lovely, as my old system sounded like a jumbo jet
• It's pretty swift and even if the graphics card could do with upgrading, it's still pretty good for my needs right now
• The speakers are usb powered and quite cute
• The keyboard ain't to bad
• There's only the power light and Aspire name that glow, so not to annoying.
• 8 USB ports and a firewire port
• Easy to open the case up
• A lot of hard drive bays

Cons -

• There's no restore dvd's out the box
• Documentation was none existent, would have been nice if they told you what the software they included was about and how to do the restore dvd's.
• The speakers are a bit weedy in power and the wire isn't long enough to have them far apart on the desk, just one monitors width, very annoying.
• No restart button (though on the plus, you can't accidentally hit it either)
  
• The mouse is rubbish
• The graphics card could have been a model or two higher
• Could have included SP1 and newest version of software/drivers (acrobat 7 for instance? wtf)
• Vista 32 bit, wtf was the point of that?

The things that bug me, vista, the constant do you want to install, move, delete thing, driving me barmy, that would be the UAC. There are loads of ways to switch this off, but this was a good way to switch it off. You'll be left with a warning that it has been switched off every time you boot up however until you do this.

The tablet panel is also rubbish once you've installed the drivers for your tablet and I found this to get rid of it, here.

Opening in a new folder when you click on it, it doesn't open it in a new window unless you've got the navigation option turned off, which can be found under the organise tab.

The menu bar and whole windows look, waste of resourses in my opinion and don't add anything to the OS, so I switched everything to the classic view, which works pretty well, but some things are a little funky. Not being able to move all my start bar menu links around was annoying, but that can be fixed by changing the folder permissions to adminstrator and allowing full rights.

Some great tips on Vista can be found here.

USB Hard drive caddies

Well I got a new desktop and didn't want to stick the old hard drives inside the new machine, but wanted the flexibility of an external USB drive, so I bought a caddy, on the cheap.

Sabrent 1 Bay (ECS-STU35) USB 2.0 External Drive Case.

That's what I bought, $25 odd, in black. It's handy and it does the job, but you certainly get what you pay for.

The manual in the box has so many spelling errors it's not funny, and it doesn't actually tell you how to use the caddy, good job it's pretty easy. It includes a set of screws, which aren't any good because you can't screw your hard drive into the case, so the hard drive sits a bit loose inside, so not great if you don't have a steady surface to keep the caddy on.

The power adaptor is huge too and very clunky, a shame they didn't go with USB power for the drive.

The case itself is also not very sturdy, the whole thing falls apart when you remove the top surface to put the drive in and the electronics inside don't feel very well made, but there is enough cable to plug your drive in. You also can't stack the cases if you had more than one, which would have been a nice feature.

Pluses to the drive though, it's cheap, it does work , there are IDE and Sata connections and it is pretty easy to swap drives around, so a handy device to have for occasional use perhaps, but it might be worth spending a little bit more money for a nicer caddy for every day needs.

Get $10 free for kids summer reading program

TD Banknorth are doing a summer reading program for children, anyone under 18.

Don't need to be a current customer, but if you are, that's okay too, just set a savings account for the child and they read ten books by the end of September and they get $10 put into the account.

To open an account, you need $25. It's also a free account until the child hits 18, then you need a minimum balance of $250 or it's a $3 a month fee.

For a free $10, what the heck, and your kid gets to read a bunch of books.