Acer Aspire 3002 Plus

It was a dark and stormy morning. A Wednesday. I remember it well ...

My computer crashed. Again. I had been having some trouble (not unbearable, really) with my great little Sotec for nearly a year, since the battery died and I haven't been able to find a replacement battery; and then I saw an advertisement for English computers in Japan at Prime PC.

I use my pc a lot and I decided that a new laptop would be worth it, and we could use my Sotec for storing files or trying out new stuff - like Linux and Open Office.

My new Acer Asprire 3002 Plus arrived on Friday night.("Plus" means that I went for a slightly upgraded model that had a dual level DVD RW drive -finally, I would be able to burn DVDs! Or...so I thought. But more on that later).

Here is my new laptop, still in the box from the takkyubin (delivery) guys:



Here I am happily taking my new 60GB HD, 1 GB RAM, 1.6 Ghz laptop out of its box:


And here is a comparison of the new Aspire (left) and the 2-year-old Sotec, side-by-side:


We are watching Kranked 5, a mountain bike video, on the new pc, and looking at the blog on the Sotec. They are both great computers, but the new Acer is definitely easier for watching videos - the screen is a 15.5 inch widescreen. And I have to admit, the body is beautiful; I am in love with it just for that.

But...after spending a lot of time personalizing my new pc, I discovered that the DVD drive does not work. It reads DVDs (though you have to set the region!), and it reads and writes CDs, but it does not write DVDs. It should write DVDs...but it doesn't. We have tried everything - looking for new drivers, finding new DVD burning software, re-configuring the Device Manager; I believe it is simply a defective DVD RW drive, and I will have to contact Prime PC first thing on Monday morning. I really hope they can simply repair or replace the DVD drive and not exchange the whole computer, as I spent a large part of last night and all day today installing my favorite software and visiting sites that required logins and passwords.

I will keep you posted on how Prime PC deals with the problem!

EDIT UPDATE- my dvd-rw drive is working just fine. My mistake - I don't think it can write to dvd-r that are 1-4x, but only 8x speed. So I can burn dvd-r 8x, dvd+r, dvd-/+rw. No problem.