Keyboard Karma ~ by Helen Crozier

Taglocity + Outlook 2007 = inbox zero

Taglocity has recently revamped it's services. I did purchase the program back in version 1 days and was quite impressed. Something stopped me from using it permanently and I cannot recall what that was. With a bit of a reinvention they now provide an easier user experience. I've downloaded the trial account and am so far loving it. For almost two weeks I've maintained 'inbox zero' as a result of reinstalling taglocity.

There is a small learning curve with setting the system up however this is well compensated for with the results.

What are these results?I am able to with one click of a tag on my tag bar assign a category to an email (it is possible to assign multiple categories).

Each tag can have associated actions. For example if I tag a file @read it will immediately put it into the @READ folder for me. If I tag it @Data it sends it off to my @ACTION folder but has the category '@Data' so it is grouped together with other emails requiring me to do some data entry. Nice!

If I tag an email @Call it creates a task in the @ACTION folder with the @Call category making a nice list of people to contact on the telephone.

If I tag an email @Archive180 it removes any other action tags that I have created and stores it in my 6 month archive folder.

I am now down to FOUR email folders and loving it.

My @ACTION emails are categorised within that folder with very little effort at all thanks to Taglocity.
@Call
@Computer
@Data
@Errands
@Home
@Office
@Pay
@Reply
My current @ACTION email folder when sorted by category looks like this!

What I try to remember to do is to 'flag' all the emails that go into @ACTION with a 'no due date flag'. If an email as been 'flagged' it will show up in the task 'to do list' view which is just wonderful. In that view I then have a mixture of tasks AND emails requiring action all in the appropriate categories.

This 'to do list' view in Outlook doesn't force me to convert my emails to tasks - it just treats them as a task because of the flag. On the other hand, items that are captured on the fly via Chapura's Key Tasks on the iphone are also seen in the lists.

The result is a system which is the merger of two different workflow inputs. The things I have to do result I think roughly from 75% emails and 25% other (meetings, calls, brainstorming, weekly review etc).

If I am still happy with this system after 30 days of constant use I will mark it as a complete success but in the meantime if you are having problems with email overload consider giving taglocity a go.

There is a free version but I will be upgrading to the professiona versionl. My main reason for that is with the professional version you can take away the 'travelling tags' at the bottom of your emails. It is not a feature I particularly embrace! Email support is provided for professional users and more premium features are promised. Currently there is a special offer - until 31st December you can purchase Taglocity 2.0 for $60US - 40% discount off full retail of $99US.

I will be writing about other benefits of taglocity soon but there is more information available on the taglocity site - eg Benefits for Individuals.

PS My inbox was persistently clogged at around the 200 email level - not huge but not what I was happy with. Since using Taglocity I've gone to sleep almost every night with an empty inbox. Do I sleep better? You bet!

Twitter in plain English & why I've succumbed

So I finally succumbed to Twitter!! This is the tag line....     
"Communicate and stay connected through the exchange of short status messages"

I watched the cute little video about it I was sold. I can get where they are coming from and partly I suppose because I've been spending a little time on facebook since returning from my trip. Finding the 'status' updates particularly useful and quick so twitter will most likely be similar.

I'm not going to flood the blog with updates... just the one most recent.... am keen to see how this all pans out :-)

Global Roaming - did you turn it on?

Back in the country for a week now and more or less sorted. Busy preparing for the AAPO (Australasian Association of Professional Organisers) Conference happening here in Sydney next Thursday/Friday. Looking forward to delivering 60 minutes of Keyboard Karma as a presentation.

Whilst travelling I wrote many notes and made observations of what worked (and sometimes didn't) in terms of technology so shall begin feeding those into the blog in the hope they will benefit others travelling a far in the near future.

Travel Tech No 1 - don't forget to turn ON international/global roaming
Did you turn on your Global Roaming? This is so basic that I'm almost embarrassed to write it. For 10 years I was with the same mobile phone company - Vodafone and once global roaming is on.. it's on. You don't normally need to worry about it again. Foolish coach that I am... I forgot that I was now with Optus since the iPhone entered my life and guess what... I had NOT made the call. Not pleasant to arrive at Malaga Airport - 35 degrees and 35 hours of travel ... with no mobile phone signal to send a text message to the person picking me up! Thankfully I had thrown a few spare Euros into my purse and managed to make the call using a payphone but what a drama it was to eventually get the phone turned on for international use. Funnily enough I bumped into others in exactly the same situation at the wedding I was attending. Optus, new iPhone, no mobile access.... trying to track down the right phone number to call was another story!

Newspapers! Online or Off?

Pedro & I have long waged this battle over newspapers. I don't really like them. I see them as expensive compared to the online version, a waste of trees, messy, completely out of date, and relentlessly time-consuming! Not bothered by my protestations however,  he continued to buy them.

Last weekend a man knocked at the door offering a ridiculously cheap deal for 6 months of home-delivered Sydney Morning Heralds. It was a marketing ploy I suspect to get you 'addicted' then after the 6 months they will charge the normal price. However, for a little over $60 we get the papers on our front lawn until February. Will I live to regret it? Well this morning the first one arrived and it took me about 15 minutes to get the damn thing out of it's obscenely tight pink plastic wrapping!

Did I trade off the petrol required to get the paper for this un-environmental plastic wrapping taking up an extra hour of my week just to get the paper out to read? I was guiltily looking forward to today's Technology section but didn't seem to have the right tools to get to it.... What's your take on men and their newspapers? Why do they cling to them as if we are robbing them of their last bastion of masculinity? Happy Monday, everyone! :-)

Technology merry-go-round & iPhone day 6

Spending far too much time on the keyboard as it were - sorting stuff out. Of course being the impatient one, I couldn't wait for my laptop to come back from repairs before I started using the iPhone. This was a bit silly but I suppose understandable to a degree. I was synchronising the iPhone to the old toshiba then the repaired Lenovo returned Monday morning and wanted a piece of the action. Since then I've been spending far too much time getting things 'right'. I found I was entering appointments however on the iPhone and they wreen't coming through to my Outlook. Panic stations! Have spent a lot of time today on the phone to apple who were pretty helpful. They think there was a corrupted events section of Outlook causing the issue. I'm not so certain as there were loads of people on the Apple forums complaining about similar problems. Yuck!!

I also found out this strange fact. The iPhone has bluetooth but it only works with Apple headsets - nothing else!! Go figure!. So if I want to synchronise via bluetooth or god forbid send some data to another iPhone it won't happen. Weird.

I've found a suitable Outlook tasks replacement which I'm very happy with. I'll write about it later in the week. I think it will actually work better than Outlook which is great. There's the ability to link tasks to goals which I think is pretty cool. Back to work tomorrow, no more fiddling or tweaking!

All complaints aside I'm still loving my new phone.

My Lenovo Idea Pad dY510 has died or is at least very unwell

Disaster has struck and I'm so upset. My Lenovo laptop which I was just so happy with has crashed and burned. A couple of weeks ago it started to do some strange things when I turned it on (ie) it would turn on, the fan would make a loud noise then it would turn off before windows had even booted. I started to worry when it was happening every second day or so consequently I called Lenovo service on Wednesday.

My call went through to Canada of all places. However, the service man was exceedingly polite and apologetic for the inconvenience. We tried a restore to default bios as the first remedy.

That  night I went to write a blog post and the damn thing started blue screening me and shutting down. I couldn't do anything.

Thursday morning I spoke to Candada again - we tried a system restore but it would get to 20 percent then turn off!!  I have to say my heart felt like breaking. I'd been so very happy with it - to make up for all the dramas with the stupid ACER I bought last year. For once I thought Ihad a machine I could rely on!
When I broke the news to Poppy she said "Don't you ever feel like doing a job that doesn't involve computers?"

I have to confess I was momentarily attracted by the idea however it's going to a service centre and will fingers crossed come back as new. Compared to ACER service - Lenovo has been a charm - all the service reps in Canada (Jeremy, Chris & Chuck) were incredibly polite & helpful which does take the edge off the experience just a little.

Does my blog look big on that?

Had a bit of fun tonight in Harvey Norman. Poppy & I dashed down there to purchase two low-tech items (a rice cooker & a wired (yes wired...) telephone. It's a huge store with a lot on display and as it was relatively quiet for late-night shopping I stayed a few moments longer to survey the scene for anything new and remarkable. Saw two men sitting in a lounge having a good time with a white wireless keyboard operating the Sony Living Room PC on a beautiful crisp high definition 40 inch Bravia. They kindly handed over the controls so I could have a play. It's pretty swish I have to say.

It's a sexy, circular apple-white round device that plugs into your television. It runs Vista Home premium and has a 500g hard drive (more than enough for all your photos, music & podcasts etc), 2gb memory and a drive that will play blue-ray movies should you so desire. Currently priced at $2399.00.

The picture was perfect and unlike most demo models in these stores the computer was actually online so we could test it out. Feeling like a girl in a candy store I zoomed as quickly as possible over to this blog to see how it looked. Apologies for the poor light photo but it was taken on my Treo. Of course it wasn't too long before a salesman came over to enquire if he could help - I didn't take Poppy's advice and bookmark the blog but I did leave it minimised as I walked away.

Look you don't need to buy the Sony Bravia to go with it - if you have a high definition television already that will work. While I wouldn't recommend it for bringing 'work' into the living room there would be times when it would definitely have advantages. I briefly imagined being able to sit with the kids and surf on the large screen planning our Christmas Holiday. It would be fun to play Scrabulous against Granny & Grandpa in England as well, and it would be nice to check out the surf down at the beach before venturing out in this wild weather. I'm sure there are lots of terrific applications - if you had such a set-up how would YOU use it?

 

Inbox Zero: I made it thanks, Gina!

Look at that! Yes I clocked it in at 2hrs 45 minutes and there were actually closer to 400 to start with in the 'inbox' because I found another folder that I had dumped everything into stupidly.... It was't too bad. What I liked best about Gina Trapani's method was the suggestion of marking all the emails in 'FollowUp" and "Hold" as unread. That way when you see the number next to the folder name you know exactly how many items you've got to action and can see the number getting smaller each time you attack it. I know 253 seems like a lot of action items but a lot of them can be dealt with in batches so I'm confident that by the end of the week that number will be way smaller. Useful shortcuts for marking emails as read or unread. CTRl+Q = mark as 'read', CTRL+U = mark as 'unread'. Oh... any super urgent things that needed my attention on a certain day or time I just dragged straight onto the calendar... simple!!

Inbox 300 to zero using 3 folders in 3 hours!

I've got to do some email triage tomorrow - I've been maintaining focus on other aspects of my business (updating the blog etc) and I've let email maintenance slip. What a drag - I've now got far more in there than I would like to confess.

I'm going to give Gina Trapani's "Empty your Inbox with the Trusted Trio" article a shot. Three folders. That's it. Follow Up, Hold & Archive. I've been saving newsletters and articles in a 'to read' folder - bah... I've got to be kidding. It's huge!! If it's something that could potentially be useful I'm just going to take Gina's advice and Archive it... wooh.... scary! The only alteration I've done is add the @ before each of the file names so that they stay up at the top of the Outlook Folder list.  I'm going to try to thoroughly blitz it in 3 hours!

Calm Tech Coach loses MOJO!

Two printers refusing to print (for different reasons), computer on a go-slow (probably because I installed Norton 360, car broken down again and let's NOT talk about all the rain. Calm Tech Coach has temporarily lost her 'mojo' and needs to desperately find it again. Tomorrow I might take a mental health day and just catch up on reading for book club. Kokoda here I come :-)

Trapped inside Office Works!!

Ahhh what a day. This morning I could not get a park close to OfficeWorks and whilst I was inside the heavens opened up!! The rain was so heavy crashing on the tin roof that I could not hear myself think. I decided to stay until it had eased off because I'd bought a few nice folders that I did not want to saturate. Thing was that the store must have had a massive sale on the weekend so I couldn't get all the folders and labelling devices I needed. I'm a bit behind in some filing and often the only way for me to get motivated and attack my 'huh huh huh piles' is to go out and buy some nice accessories to get me started. Trust me to pick a day when the shelves were almost empty :-). Office is back to looking reasonable though and I have only one pile to get through before I'm back in control. My Brother p-touch labeller has had a workout today that's for sure.

Calm Tech???

Last night I was playing with my new & wonderful GPS - mapping out the route I might take on our holiday after Christmas. In the middle of doing this I got a 'fatal error occurred, restarting' error. I didn't think much of it but went to go back into the maps section. Same error. Tried again. Same error. Tried to do a 'restore' which is like a reset which normally fixes all technology ailments. Strangely enough the 'restore' did not erase all data as I was warned so therefore it was not a proper reset and consequently the blasted error remained. I was furious but at midnight on a Saturday what could a girl do?

Today I googled and researched and could find nothing but praise for this MIO C520 model. What I could not find was any help for my restart error which stubbornly remained throughout the day. I took the next step of updating firmware from the mio website - feeling optimistic that this would be a certain cure. Nope. I sent a "Help please, I'm very upset" form to technical support and even tried (in vain of course) the tech support help line. No answer. I had imagined I would be 'out there' adventurously exploring. I guess I was secretly grateful it was raining for most of the day and I stayed indoors. Unbelievable..... my partner said "why is all this technology around you failing? Is it your titanium hip?" Could it be?

Technology casualties in my life right now are:-

• ACER desktop - randomly restarting with no warning - tech support deny there is anything wrong
• Treo 680 occasionally restarting when a call comes in and I press 'answer' - Palm suggested I do a 'hard reset' which I did. Symptoms still persist.
• Mio C%20 GPS (it WAS love at first touch) - fatal error, unable to access maps
• Topfield Masterpiece PVR (Personal Video Recorder) failing terribly - scrambled signal, sometimes no picture at all - it's been back three times for repair as well and is still not resolved
• Canon IXUS 65 digital camera- Poppy's birthday present in January - has this crazy lens error where it goes crazy then beeps at you before shutting down (a whole website has been devoted to this issue so it's obviously common)
• My toaster also gave up the ghost last week as well - does that count?

Enough is enough!!!!!How wonderful!!!I am no doubt going to spend the entire week before Christmas trekking all over town demanding justice and seeking technology that damn well does what it is supposed to do.

Excuse my language but I'm feeling very cross!!!

Mio Digiwalker C520 will you finally be mine?

Found this little gem - the Mio Digiwalker C520 GPS - back in May when it first came out and so wanted it!! Alas it was $699 and I could not justify such a big spend. I loved the idea of it's 4.3 widescreen, split screen, bluetooth connectivity and the Good Weekend section of the Sydney Morning Herald would taunt me almost weekly with sexy advertising - "I'll show you the way" -  indeed!

Anyhow I have some Christmas present money generously sent by family sitting in the bank account so I just thought to check on the latest pricing. Woohoo....  Gadget Guy thought this model was good value at $699 but now the recommended retail price has been reduced to $499. Research shows Ryda.com to be the cheapest  at $438  with $90 added value (external gps + screen protector) PLUS a $25 fuel voucher kind of bringing the price down to $324!  Am I glad I waited this time or what?

Reviews are very positive and I think this is a small price to pay if you are anything like me and can't read a map to save your life. I can't stand using a street directory and if I don't have someone in the car to navigate for me I truly will break out in a cold sweat once I lose my bearings. I'm so hopeless and I could just kiss the person who invented these devices. (I did own one years ago which hooked up with my Palm PDA  - unfortunately Navman stopped supporting Palm so it became useless). I am going to sleep on this one more night but no doubt will order in the morning. How exciting!!

EBAY WINS & LOSSES

In order to maintain a sense of calm over the prevailing Christmas madness I put together an elaborate mind map with the title "House Ready for Summer" and for each room I put a sub-category with details of what needed to be done, what needed to be bought and what needed to be discussed etc. We are reluctant to be spending too much on the house given that we think it is 'dead money' should we be able to renovate within the next year or two so I've been bargain hunting on EBAY.

Loss - an 'as new' oven (mine has more or less blown up since it was cleaned a little too vigorously some weeks ago) - what annoys me most is that I lost despite using Auction Sniper.
Win - a brand new Italian gas stovetop
Win - a brand new ceiling fan for ET (he's having an Irish friend stay for 8 weeks so it might be just a little bit stuffy without ventilation!)
Loss - brand new double bed (poor Poppy - I put my bid in with 7 minutes to go because there had been no other interest and then someone using Auction Sniper no doubt beat me!!

Poppy was pretty cross with me - she even said "You bid too soon!" and she was right...... you really do have to go in like a sniper.

Calm Tech Coach & ACER Power 1000

I've had this ongoing saga with ACER for over 2 months. The stupid thing restarts randomly and it doesn't feel good. The poor service guy came yesterday for the third time and replaced the power supply. He said that if it mucks up again I would need to escalate the call and get the machine replaced. It crashed twice on Monday when I was accessing Outlook. Today it crashed and restarted when I was installing Jing. I've been saving and saving but I do a lot of work in 10 minutes and I'd lost it. I've put an escalation web form in - instead of waiting on hold on the telephone for 50 minutes but of course I've heard nothing back. It's really frustrating to get a 'lemon'. I don't feel settled when technology mucks up because I can't trust it. I've been worried about doing remote support in case the damn thing restarts in the middle of it. Now I know for sure I'll be using my laptop until I get a replacement. My 'rule' is that no matter how horrid the process is - you've got to perservere and get things fixed even if it means terrible times on the phone.  Sometimes clients pay me to do these calls for them because they can't stand it. I'm really good doing it for other people but not 'so calm' when I'm doing it for myself. Here's hoping tomorrow brings a positive result.

Reboots are the panadol of computing

From 11am or so this morning my emails stopped leaving my inbox. For no reason! I was working on tomorrow's Keyboard Karma so didn't pay huge attention. When I'd finished that however I started to get cross that they were still 'stuck'. A couple were emails that I'd like answers to pretty quickly and one which had not gone was to someone who must have thought I was ignoring him!! I called the ISP, waited on hold forever and he went through with me to check my email settings. I had already done this. Everything was fine. You know what he said? Have you rebooted since you got the problem? I was embarrassed to say I had not. How stupid!!! This is the first question I always ask my clients and I'd not done it myself. So.... after a reboot one email went off on it's merry way but two chose to be stubborn and stay 'stuck'. This is what I did. I dragged them from the outbox to the inbox individually. I then opened each one and clicked 'send' and off they went. Why did this happen? Who knows... even the ISP guy couldn't explain it. I'm just offering the solution in case you go through this irritating problem yourself one day.

Mama Mia, I understand your technology rage!

Poor Mia Freedman. I felt sick when I was reading this in the Sunday paper (yes paper, not online - Sunday was my 24 hour tech-fast which thankfully I survived!). It has prompted me to really get going with my Backup Before You Crackup online learning sessions asap!!

Mia was trying to update her operating system, seduced no doubt by the mesmerising spots of Leopard (and who wouldn't be!!). She may well have been over the recommended blood alcohol limit for doing so but what the heck.... it was after all Friday night. Unfortunately she had not done a backup before attempting the upgrade and next morning was unable to access her system or data at all. She was then held ransom at the Apple support centre - "several hours of labour at $160/hr and we can't guarantee it will work". Four days later and $600 poorer poor Mia now sleeps with her laptop under her pillow!

The subject of backup can be daunting - mostly because it's hard to choose the best way of doing it. A couple of years ago I thought I had the perfect backup system in place. I was saving all of my data to an external hard drive. Unfortunately my laptop chose to crash big time. It was away at the doctor's for 10 days and everything was lost. I wasn't too panicked knowing I had a 'system' in place for such dramas. Laptop came back. I went to retrieve my data from the safety vault and guess what? The safety vault decided to chuck a wobbly and crash itself. I managed to get back all my digital photos but nothing else before it died a slow and painful death. I was so desperate to try to get my emails and documents off it I even tried the 'put it in the freezer' trick. I felt so stupid wrapping it up in a ziplock bag and placing it next to my filo pastry but what did I have to lose apart from 5 years of emails and documents?

Needless to say it didn't work. That stupid hard drive sits on the top shelf of my office - I keep hoping/thinking someone will be able to do something with it eventually - by which time the data will be of no relevance anyway!

So from that experience I've looked at alternatives. Portable hard drives seemed atractive at one stage but they are now so small that they are probably quite easy to lose. For the last year or so I've been experimenting with  a combination of portable hard drive AND online backup systems. Mozy offers online backup for Windows & Mac. The process is automatic and happens in the background, updating your backed up files as you change them. If you are that rare animal with less than 1gb of data the backup is free. For unlimited data backup the cost is $4.95US a month. Small price to pay for insurance of your digital life.

I empathise with Mia and her story of technology rage. I'm supposed to be the Calm Tech Coach but even I wish I had a punching bag downstairs that I could kick when technology starts mucking ME around!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to Mozy - I have tried it and it worked for me. A plethora of online backup systems exist some of which I have tried and will comment on in the near future.

The Calm Tech Coach Meets 'Heavenly Order'

I was having coffee (decaf) with Sarah from Heavenly Order yesterday -  we were having a bit of a laugh about our family history (fathers mad keen on technology - is geekiness an inherited gene perhaps?). We were also chatting madly about gadgets, programs, gps systems and AAPO - it was so great to be with a girl on the same wavelength! One embarrassing problem was that I was yet again without my wallet. Thankfully I had however remembered to bring a gift voucher that I'd been meaning to use for a long time  so could even manage to buy Sarah a caramel slice!

What a week of craziness!

• 2 instances of leaving wallet at home
• 1 case of panic because I was looking at the wrong week in my diary and thought I'd missed taking the dog to get a haircut
• 1 lost e-ticket for a conference (how can that happen to me... with all my tools and desktop searches how could it completely disappear??)
• 1 unpleasant situation of feeling 'lost' on my way to conference knowing that the printed out directions from google maps were still sitting in my printer!

You see, even if we have fabulous 'systems' in place I think that sometimes the Universe just does it's own thing and a little bit of chaos will happen just for the sake of it.  Here's to a more 'sorted' week coming up.

Punishment for a fleeting vain thought

So .... yesterday  I had an 'appointment' with Poppy and I was pleased because for once it looked as thought I was on time and wouldn't be leaving her on a street corner texting me, saying 'where r u?". Walking up to the car as I was putting my bag in I felt for a split second strangely proud of this nice new leather satchel. I was thinking how nice it looked and 'how organised I was'. Ha! Collected Poppy and got to Spotlight which is enormous and so FULL of 'stuff'. We were looking for craft material so she could make some kind of furry creepy critter ipod-holder. Finally we got to the counter with all our things . No wallet!  No I hadn't bought a Doorganizer (and besides would it fit a fat wallet?)..... Had to return today. Priceless!

Putting my desk on the 'declutter diet'

OK I've got this silly little idea but here goes let's try it out!! I remember that when there is a weight challenge it is suggested that you put on your fridge (heaven forbid the clutter police might not like that) a photo of yourself at the weight you loved being. I always have in mind a particular photo taken about 15 years ago or so ..... wearing a red dress... as skinny as a bean... but I digress!! Anyhow the theory is that if you often look at the desired end you will somehow beat a path to that goal. This theory has in fact worked for me before so I trust it a tiny bit :-).

So.... I took a photo of my desk today after I'd spent another couple of hours 'sorting'.(Hint: click on the photo to get full size) I'm really happy now because I got rid of a filing cabinet that was always for the life of me making me feel cramped and closed in. The feng shui was obviously terrible. Today after reading Lissanne Oliver's great new book Sorted I was inspired to ditch one of the filing cabinets.  Really it was only containing 'stuff' that could well be placed elsewhere. I decided to try Lissanne's idea of using ring binders for reference material.(I met Lissanne at the AAPO conference - she really was a true breath of fresh air!) How simple!! Why didn't I think of that. It's not like I own a load of reference material anyway. MOST of it is online or stored on my computer. Yes... I decided I could try that out and give myself just a little bit more space.

After offloading and re-organising I'm pleased to say it feels great. I was so happy with the area available for work on my desk that I decided to take a photo of it as it was today.... my nice 'skinny', 'decluttered' desk.... You will see below the result. It's not the most gorgeous office the world but I do feel like I could get some productive work done there. I know where to put stuff.. I know where to find stuff... and that ladies is the best feeling! The final thing I did at the end of the afternoon was to make the photo of my 'tidy' desk the wallpaper on my computer desktop (second photo!!). The theory is you see that when my desk gets out of control - as it will - as it does in the normal 'flow' of work... if I look at my computer I will see the desired state and be motivated to get back to that!.

Here's hoping..... more posts will follow with a bit more detail about the individual items that for the moment seem to work for me... help me maintain a small degree of 'calm'....

Very keen to see other 'desks' and 'desktops'.... please email me and tell me what works for you oh and thanks Lissanne, your book is wonderful!
 

Calm Tech Coach loses it!

No pretty pictures tonight just a bit of a 'whinge' - hope I feel better afterwards!
My relatively new ACER desktop has been playing up. Random restarts not connected with anything in particular. Blue screens as well. Nightmare!!
Have called ACER customer service and twice been told that it is most likely a driver issue so a reformat should fix. Long laborious procedure - backing up data, reinstalling all the software yadda yadda.... not good. Random restarts continued - and considering I am getting close to offering online teleclasses I was going a bit crazy for it to be fixed.
Last Friday I put in a call explaining the issue and thankfully the rep said 'we'll send a tech out to look at it - probably the RAM or the power supply perhaps'.
Asked when the techie would come and I was told 5-7 days!! I had paid an extra $150 at the time of purchase to upgrade the warranty to NEXT BUSINESS DAY so I was pretty upset to be told that there was no record of me having the warranty upgrade. I scanned a copy of my receipt showing I had purchased it - on the line describing the 'product' it said NBD - you would assume this meant NEXT BUSINESS DAY right? Next morning the same service rep called saying that despite the fax there was still no proof that I did indeed have the cover.
On the phone to the retailer I was then told that I had been offered a partial refund because that particular warranty no longer existed for my product!! I said I couldn't accept that and finally yesterday after several phone calls the retailer agreed to re-instate my NBD warranty and let ACER know this had been done.
Today I heard nothing from ACER so decided to give them a hurry along in the never ending hope that they might send out the guy tomorrow.
Customer service operates until 7.00pm weekdays. I started the call at 6.15pm - I was no 19 in the queue. By 6.59pm I was number 4 in the queue but guess what? Yes you guessed it - after being on hold for 45 minutes because it was 7.00pm my call was disconnected!!! How very charming!!! I could hardly stop myself from having a temper tantrum I'm afraid. Not happy at all.... we shall see what happens tomorrow.