Refund please

I was fortunate enough to purchase a rather nice ASUS N53S Laptop since my previously modded Compaq CQ-41 unexpectedly bit the dust last Saturday. I was quite amazed at the current laptop specs: 15.6" LCD full HD display, Intel core i7-2630QM @ 2.0 Ghz, 16GB Ram, USB 3.0, 640GB HDD, 2GB NVidia Geforce GT550M and Blue Ray player for a reasonable AU $1700.

The hard disk was partitioned into three partitions: 150GB (C:) , 425GB (D:) and the rest into a hidden recovery partition. While there may be technical reasons why the partitions were created this way I certainly prefer one big ass C: partition. Being the clever person I am I downloaded Acronis Disk Director 11 trial edition which reportedly could merge adjacent partitions. Unfortunately the merge feature was not available in the trial edition so I coughed up $69 for a single user license.

Installation was a breeze and running the application I was presented with a very nicely designed UI showing my current partition layout. I selected my C: partition and clicked 'Merge' and then selected my D: partition. I specified that C: would be the main partition. Should I take a backup? hmm, well if the product works as expected then there shouldn't be any need to right? I mean, backing up 500GB alone would take a considerable amount of time not to mention the merge process itself. This is a commercial product that Acronis has spent much time and money perfecting right?

After clicking the "commit pending actions" button a dialog box appeared to confirm that it needed to restart the computer. Fair enough, that's what I did. The machine booted into the Acronis Disk Director environment and started executing "operation 2 of 2". This may take some time...

Time passes and two donuts mysteriously disappear from the fridge. Nice. Ok, lets see what Disk Director is up to. Huh? still sitting at 0% complete? hmm, hard disk light on solid, and 0% for the last hour? this can't be right? Ok, where's the cancel button.. errr there isn't one. There's absolutely nothing on the screen to indicate whether the application has gone into la-la land or not (which I suspect it has) and there is no way to test this theory, no cancel button, no progress spinner or elapsed time readout, ..nothing.

The Uber cancel button - holding down the power button for 5 seconds - allowed me to reboot into Windows. Surprisingly, there appeared to be no damage to the contents of the disk. Phew, lucky.. The support options for the product seemed to only suggest per incident PAID SUPPORT, although later I found an email address to get email support with 1-3 business days. This is crap, I just bought the product why do they want me to pay for support too? Sounds like a scam.

After browsing through the forums I came across this forum post and this one and this one and this rather amusing one. Looks like I'm not the only one who has been bitten by this product.

Yes, refund please. What a lame product and what a poor, sorry excuse for a company. Under no circumstances should anyone buy Acronis Disk Director 11.

Instead, here's a great product which works called Partition Wizard and for the same price gives you life time upgrades! Totally recommended.

[Edit] - I actually received a refund, hoorah!