Greetings!

I was lucky enough to win an Acer Aspire iDea 511, an Intel VIIV based MCE computer preloaded with Vista Home Premium.

The bad thing about this device is that I found many problems after finishing the Vista installation and need support now. And here's the catch: Microsoft doesn't support it because it's the OEM's task and Acer Germany (I am located there.) doesn't even list this device in the support section of their web site. Does anyone know the best way to get support for this device? As I wrote I have won it so there is no dealer involved which I could normally ask.

Thanks for any tips. And if you are curious enough you can continue reading as I am going to list the problems which I have found so far. I am afraid I will find more the more I use the computer.

cheerio

Thomas

• The hard drive is pretty noisy. Especially after booting the computer it is making an irritating mechanical noise for a couple of minutes. I haven't bought a hard drive for ages so I don't know if this is perhaps normal for newer generation hard drives or not. Is it?
• During Vista's installation I had to create a user account. Since this is an admin account I created a "normal" one (without god permissions) after finishing the installation to be used for daily operation. Now the thing is this: If I log in to the admin account and then log off, the trackpad of the keyboard does not work any more. I can then tab to the normal user in the login screen, log in / log off and viola: The trackpad works again.
• MCE finds only a fraction of the available DVB-T stations but is not able to display any of them in Live TV. I'm using the same aerial that receives all of the available stations if I plug it into a different computer or into a DVB-T STB.
• Media Center contains a couple of Acer's Add ons. If I start e.g. "AV-Input Source Selector" a window pops up with the message "Media Center Extensibility Host does not work any more" (my translation, the original message is in German). That's pretty odd in my opinion since I am only starting one of the programs that the OEM has preinstalled. Should this not work without printing error messages?
• There's another Media Center issue when I just launch it and wait a little bit, say 20 seconds. Then a window pops up with this message "INVALID APPLICATION - SymAddIn cannot be run" (Again this is my translation from German.) If I close this window by clicking OK a further window pops up with the message "The program 'SymAddIn' does not respond and you are returned to Windows Media Center". Why is that? I have never experienced such problems on computers that were assembled by me and which received Windows Retail by me. Shouldn't OEM Windows installations at least be free of such obvious bugs? How can I rectify this?
• I cannot change BlueTooth settings. The only hint to BT is a BT icon in the Startup folder but other than that I could assume the computer does not even have BT. But that's unlikely for a computer that was introduced 2007 and which got a BT icon put into a folder by the OEM, right?
• USB mice are incompatible with this computer. It recognizes them as "Unknown Device" only. It is independent of which USB port I try to connect one of the mice to. All of these mice work fine in different computers.
• During the Vista installation there was a window requesting me to register the computer. Is there a way to launch this window now? It contained a serial number and maybe even more information that could be useful.

Your experience just about sums up Acer Media Centers for me - I bought one of the original Acer L250 "Living Center" machines several years ago for a customer.  The first one couldn't hold a stable picture on a monitor, nor provide clean sound without distortion, and after much effort of getting it returned and replaced by the internet store it was bought from, the replacement had a hybrid tuner that could only find a few DVB-T channels on an aerial that other Media Centers could find all of the channels, and when run in analogue mode, stuttered every few seconds.

When Acer brought out their latest small form factor Media Center PCs, I bought one to use as a small demo machine (the L3600 I think it was called).   This machine, despite coming with hybrid DVB-T/analogue tuner and having the words "IR Blaster" silkscreened on the back, had no IR blaster cable or socket to plug one into!  I didn't notice this until after I'd set it up and got to the point that said "now plug in the IR blaster"... I carried on and set it up with a Microsoft IR instead, but the machine crashed so often I sent it back.

I'll never buy another one. 

Cheers,
Andrew