Problems with my refurb 751 11" Acer

Just took delivery of a refurb Acer 751 and within an hour of use it was giving me blue screen reboots, lost the audio driver, won't install Picasa and won't install Logitech Vid software. I tried various things like booting into safe mode and now it won't even boot up. I hate to have to send it back. Ideas?

My son has an Acer Aspire One model ZG5 that's running XP and we installed Picasa and Logitech Vid no problem. But, the 751 I have has some sort of webcam utility that his doesn't and that must be causing at least part of the problem. I've tried to uninstall Logitech Vid and it won't let me. When booting up, I got errors about unable to load Vid.exe along with a Win32 error.

 

I'd suggest you take it back.
Its a refurb, so it should be working fine and it seems its not.
Does it come with warranty? If not, have it refunded. Don't buy Acer without the warranty because I guarantee you, you'll need it.

 

That's all the reassurance I needed. Its in the box ready to go. Since the warranty is 90 days direct from Acer, it would be a drag to go through repair/replacement so its going back to Geeks.com

Question: my son's laptop is a smaller aspire one and the webcam is open to be used with other software. I know because I had no problem installing Logitech Vid and getting it to work. The 751 has a webcam utility that sits in the systray and the options for using the webcam are AOL, windows live and I think Google. Is this utility on all the newer Acer Aspire netbooks? I'm considering getting an 1810 to replace the 751 I'm sending back. Will it have the same utility? Can it be removed and the webcam still function?

 

The Acer webcam utility is bloatware. You do not need any of it. After installing Win7, I just use the Windows generic webcam driver. If you want to take still pics though, you will need the Acer driver or other webcam application.

 

What software do I need to leave on the 751 to have the webcam still function? I plan to stick with winxp

 

The webcam only needs the driver to function. You can safely remove all preinstalled software related to the webcam. Yahoo, Windows messenger or whatever you will use will recognize the webcam and work from there.
If you are doing a clean OS install, most likely Windows will install a working driver for you. If not, then you can download and install the webcam driver from Acer's download site.

None of the preinstalled software is needed for other programs to use your webcam.

 

Thank you for your help guys.

I'm hoping they'll at least swap my laptop and give me one that works. The first thing I did with my other one was remove McAfee. After removing some other bloatware like some games I lost my WNMM audio driver and tried to reload it but after one successful attempt it vanished again never to be installable again. Picasa3 would never install and every time I tried to start the computer before it finally stopped booting I got an error that mentioned Win32.sys

Needless to say, I'm gunshy about removing anything next time I have a working Acer so any tips about landmines to avoid would be helpful.