Jacdeb6009

Hi there Hugo,

Where I live at present (Vietnam), finding a replacement drive has proven to be impossible. Acer VN claim that this drive is no longer used (I cannot confirm this) and they carry no spares. They have offered to try and get me a drive that will fit the machine, but for this they want about $ 200 US and claim it will take about 10 weeks (what is this, gold plated, hand made??). It was all a bit too frustrating.

I have decided to live with the situation as is for the time being since the machine will at least still read CD ROM's and RW's (I can burn discs on another machine). Watching DVD's was never the reason for buying it so from that point of view it is only a nuisance with respect to capacity.

Longer term I will have to buy a new machine since this one cannot boot from a USB (this is a BIOS restriction I didn't realise when I bought the darn thing). If it would boot from a USB the solution (despite the speed penalty) would simply be to buy an external unit. Portability of the CD/DVD is not that big an issue to me.

So to cut a long story short, I will eventually be forced to replace the machine, but I am not crying about is since I got 3 years of more or less trouble free service out of it (which is more than I can say for its HP predecessor which survived 18 months during which the m/board was replaced 3 times!!)

Will have to find a laptop that will run Linux well, this will be an interesting challenge.

Hope this helps, sorry if it disappoints.

Jac