New Aspire 3830TG-6412 not completing initial setup

I have a brand new Acer Aspire TimelineX - 3830TG-6412. I am now on my third attempt at the initial setup and the machine appears to be going nowhere. I am unsure whether this stage just takes a REALLY long time or if there is something fundamentally wrong with the machine.

On its first run I got through all the new Windows setup stuff with the user, password, and machine name etc. Then the Acer screen popped up and said it was installing stuff (12 steps). After a couple of hours it got to step 4 (Office 2010) and sat there for about 4 hours with the HDD light permanently on and the drive itself making low noise. Eventually the mouse cursor froze and after 1 more hour I decided to power off and start again.

I used the recovery (alt-f10) approach to factory reset then started again with initial setup. Now it is stuck in a different place (44 steps) - on the Acer screen again - at step 9, 'Installing Dritek Launch Manager'.

I am torn between a number of possibilities:

1. there is a hardware problem that is causing problems but not crashing the machine
2. Acer's OEM Windows package is a pile of crap and is causing software issues that do not necessarily indicate faulty hardware (and therefore a replacement laptop could have exactly the same problem)
3. something completely different that I haven't thought of yet

If this turns out to be normal behaviour I will be astonished. With the HDD going continuously for many hours I can only assume that several million very small files are going on to the drive, which I will subsequently be removing. Assuming I do not have a hardware fault, is there any way I can skip the junkware Acer has included in Windows and just get a basic OS installation and figure out the drivers etc. later?

Any thoughts on this much appreciated.

 

If you have access to another machine, you could by downloading the W7 SP1 ISO from the link below, burn it to disk or usb and away you go, they are legal links from digital river and instructions are in the thread, the only issue with this, is that it will pretty much make the recovery partition useless as it wipes Acers MBR, making it inoperable.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-digitalriver-windows-7-sp1-13-languages.html

This is the way I install Windows, any new machine I have, first thing I will do is wipe the recovery partition and the install on the machine, and install a fresh copy, gets rid of the bloatware and it's all nice and fresh. I always keep a couple of copies of it for safe measure, if you do go this route, make sure you download the wireless drivers or Ethernet drivers and have them handy before you install. I've had a couple of machines and found windows has a nasty habit of not being able to install drivers for these 2, if you've got no internet access, can be very tricky and frustrating to say the least lol!!

 

Thanks for the suggestion Full-English, but I think I will pass due to the risk of upsetting the manufacturer warranty - wiping the MBR sounds like a good excuse for Acer to not help me out.

I bought the laptop from a large electronics chain rather than online so that I could easily return it if I had any issues, so I think that's my best option. However I imagine they will want to give me a replacement so hopefully this is a hardware issue specific to the one machine

 

That's fair enough, if it's new and your having issues, getting it replaced over the counter would be the best option.

About the warranty, not sure what the deal is with the warranty and recovery partition, I know a lot of people do what I suggested here, and don't run into to many issues, but I'm guessing it would depend what part of the world you are in, different service centres I guess have different ways of doing things!!