Update to "Out of Range" message below - getting nowhere fast!!!

[Guest]

Well, having tried all of your suggestions (thank you!), and being no further
forward, I called Microsoft, who were quite helpful, but we just went round
in circles and ended up with the same message on the screen. They now say I
need the XP recovery disks so that we can put XP back on and try to upgrade
again from there, so I contacted Acer, but they don't send these out!
HELP!!!!!!!! Called Comet, who say that I should have backed up XP before
installing Vista - nobody told me that and we didn't have any discs to do it
anyway!!!

I wish we'd never gone down the Upgrade to Vista road - at least we would
have a PC that worked!!!!!!!!!!!! We've had it for 2 months now, and have not
used it yet! Nobody seems to want to own this problem!

Any suggestions??????????!!!!!!!! before I go completely insane!

Many thanks,

Cathy

 

[Malke]

Well, having tried all of your suggestions (thank you!), and being no further
forward, I called Microsoft, who were quite helpful, but we just went round
in circles and ended up with the same message on the screen. They now say I
need the XP recovery disks so that we can put XP back on and try to upgrade
again from there, so I contacted Acer, but they don't send these out!
HELP!!!!!!!! Called Comet, who say that I should have backed up XP before
installing Vista - nobody told me that and we didn't have any discs to do it
anyway!!!

I wish we'd never gone down the Upgrade to Vista road - at least we would
have a PC that worked!!!!!!!!!!!! We've had it for 2 months now, and have not
used it yet! Nobody seems to want to own this problem!

Any suggestions??????????!!!!!!!! before I go completely insane!

Since you didn't post to your original thread I have no idea what your
graphics issues were, but I can address the question raised in this new
thread. It's pretty crappy that Acer won't send you the recovery disks.
You might want to try to escalate to customer service. If they still
won't send you the disks, you'll need to either buy a retail copy of XP
(and get all the drivers for your machine from Acer's website) or take
the machine to a local professional who will be able to do an install
with a generic (or branded if s/he has one) OEM install disk. In the
latter case, the Product Key from the bottom of the laptop is used and
activation called in.

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html - Clean Install How-To
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Reinstalling_Windows -
What you will need on-hand


Malke

 

[JW]

Did Acer put a separate XP recovery partition on your disk from which you
could have made your own recovery CDs?
If they did and the partition is still there then Acer may be able to tell
you how to run a XP recovery.