I am not looking for 15 minutes of fame. I am just so outraged I wanted the whole tech and computer user community at large to know. I have an Acer brand computer. (Acer is part of Gateway and Emachines I believe) My motherboard recently went out and the computer wouldn't POST. I called the tech support guys and told them the pc wouldn't POST. To which they tried to get me to reinstall windows and after I finally got them to understand it was a hardware issue they told me I would have to send it in for service. I being the geek that I am (I have worked for Best Buy as a technician , before geek squad mind you, and I have a degree in computer technology and currently work as a programmer) I asked if they could just send me the motherboard and let me replace it. Of course the answer was no. When i asked could i take the hard drive out before sending the answer again was no. I had to send all of it. So I paid the $50 to ship it to the acer repair facility to TX. When it got back and I booted it up I noticed Vista didn't ask for my password. I have 3 children and as a rule of them I always run a keylogger on my system. I knew they had no reason to be in windows because it was a hardware repair. I checked the keylogger and sure enough there was data for when the computer was in Texas.

After looking at the 249 screenshots my keylogger produced I was horrified as I watched some unknown tech change my display resolution to better suit him. He then proceded to browse through my pc. He opened media player and did a search for all my picutres, music and video, and then had the audacity to COPY a folder OFF of my desktop onto his jump drive. I immediatly called acer it's been about a little over a week now and all they want to offer me is a WARRENTY EXTNSION (i guess they didn't get all the stuff they wanted off my hard drive to begn with) and 1 gig of ram (to go in a computer running 32bit windows vista with 3 gigs already and a 512mb video card an the most the system can address is 4 gigs) I sent them the screenshots you can plainly see him coping the files, browsing my files and even how big his jump drive is.

I just had to let everyone i could know

I don't know extactly what it is I want out of this but I know I don't want it to be swept under the rug. Everyone deserves to know the real reason they tell you to send your hard drive.