Big problems with Acer notebook

wwwcarole

My son has a Acer aspire 5315 which is still under manufacturers warranty. Its been performing badly for a while....VERY slow and unresponsive. Called BT support line which I subscribe to and after running some tests over the phone they think its an error in the memory. I thought we had made recovery discs but cannot find them anywhere desite a comprehensive search. I have been quoted £48 from Acer for some new ones. Second problem, my son (he is only 13) can't remember the password for the recovery mnagement. Again, Acer quoting £48 to reset. Is there anything else I can do without spending £48? I have insurance from PC world where he bought it from, currently costing £8 per month.

Thank you all so much in advance. I often read the posts here but this is my very first time!

Carole

Donnie

Memory error or HDD error?

Bowling_4_Gold

Why not ring up PC World and see what they do, taking into account you pay them £8 a month to look after the damned thing?

tomsutton529

Bowling_4_Gold wrote: »

Why not ring up PC World and see what they do, taking into account you pay them £8 a month to look after the damned thing?

thats what i would do if i paid someone to look after my machines.

a good clean out often makes a big differnce, I did one last week and only had to clear all the documents off the desktop to make a huge differnce. do obvious things like disc cleanup, defrag etc. some of the computer tune up programs are quite good. I would do things like that before i take it somewhere, as i dont trust alot of places like PC world.

prowla

Acer laptops are spawn of the devil!
They have a separate recover partition on the hard disk that is supposed to keep a backup of your config and the original media.
There should be a tool there to burn some install disks too.
based on what i saw when I tried rebuilding one for a friend, the recovery doesn't work and the backup facility is decidedly ropey.
They may be cheap to buy initially, but it's a false economy IMHO.

wwwcarole

Bowling_4_Gold wrote: »

Why not ring up PC World and see what they do, taking into account you pay them £8 a month to look after the damned thing?

Mmmm, they were the ones that told me to phone Acer who in turn shocked me with the £48 news! In retrospect I made a big mistake taking out the insurance with PC world as now thinking about it the machine is guaranteed for 12 months by Acer anyhow. Silly me.

Will attempt the clean up suggested here and see what happens. I guess my question was is there any other way to retrieve the discs without having to buy a set....surely they should still be on the computer or is that me just being dumb?

Thanks for all your replies and apologies if I am causing frustration by my potentially daft questions!

Carole

wwwcarole

Donnie wrote: »

Memory error or HDD error?

I think memory....according to the nice man at BT he said memory error but I got the impression it was hard drive? Oh god, does that make sense?

Donnie

If you lived nearby in London, I would just fix the darned thing for you. Ridiculous that you are paying PC World for nothing.

Anyway, first thing first. We'll find out machine spec., whether there is sufficient RAM, whether you have any infections....

You can also run a test on the memory, but I think it unlikely that is the problem.

So, on your keyboard, press the Flying Windows key together with the Pause Break key and report what is under System and Computer on Windows XP or Windows Edition and System on Vista.

Donnie

Erm.....

wwwcarole

Donnie, apologies for my snail response

Okay, tried that and I am getting the following message

StartRep.exe - Application Error
The instruction at 0x75887735 referenced memory at 0x75887735. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of 0xc0000185
Click on OK to terminate the programme

Yikes!