Acer - The Laptop Hell

Hello Orpheuse,

I'm sorry mate but we at CR4 require far more information than that! We need to know if it was fully laden or not, or if it was African or Indian?

I am definitely not the right person to talk to about computers, got any electrical problems that I can help you with?

It has a built in wireless adapter 802.11g

The disk drive is by Toshiba - can't get a version

The screen comes up standard VGA except for the crystal-bright component

the screen has a built in webcam and mic

There are 2 USB ports

There is one external VGA port

Built in cat5 LAN adapter

there is a headphone/mic jack in front.

The system was fully laden except for 1 gig of ram. The system came with 1 gig of ram - ddr (actually 2 512 k's)

So at the moment you can't see the C: drive, but it is there and formatted?

Just insert the CD for Windows XP and it should locate the drive and offer to install...

I think that's what I did when I received my second hand laptop with the C drive invisible...

Windows XP should offer to format the drive for you.

Can you get into the BIOS? I couldn't with mine, but if you can you should be able to fiddle the BIOS to automatically recognise the C drive...

Or maybe its sommit else!!??

First, Vista is the software that won't leave. I've formatted the "C" drive to NTFS. The silly thing keeps looking for a file called BOOTMGR, which is what happens when you make a drive bootable under Acer XP.

When you try to load XP PRO you get a blue screen error. After that, anything you try will not work.

I've spent 2 weeks going back and forth to the Acer site. I have every download for XP that they had available.

Somehow I need to get those files onto the same disk as Win XP Pro because no 2 components in this system has the same manufacturer and they are all in "zip" format. Do you have to unzip them into a folder with the same name as the driver before you try to merge XP PRO with the device divers I have for the Acer. If You look at posts 1 and 3 you will see that I've listed every report regarding drivers that this machine spits out.

What I'm hoping you guys can find is a step by step instruction book(?) that outlines how to downgrade an Acer to XP Pro.

Thanks,

Ari (Orpheuse)

I assume the drive is formatted because I can't see it. Neither can any other software, unless I do a factory default restore.

There seems to be some kind of HDD loader, but I can't find what it is called. It's like "Acer Empowering Software", which is some kind of GUI assistant.

I am quiet familiar as to how XP is suppossed to work. It just won't do it on the Acer Laptop. It only offered to format the "C" drive once, while Vista was still on it. Since then, nothing.

Yes, I can get into the BIOS. The drives are set for automatic and they don't seem to see the SATA hard disk or DVD burning DVD/C-d combo.

Please, help.

Thanks,

Ari (Orpheuse)

Ohhhh Gawd, it sounds like you know more than me about this...

I did wonder about looking through the toshiba site for a download to check and install the hard drive...

I have the software for Western Digital and Maxtor, Toshiba must have something similar? Which you can download to a floppy/CD and then boot up the Acer with and let the toshiba diagnostics sort it out???

I' have heard that Vista is a pain, but I've no experience of using it - maybe an on-line computer forum can help? either Acer or a general one???

Sorry that's about all I can think of....Good luck!

Acer won't help beyond fixing Vista. I'm reasonably certain that Toshiba does not have drivers for Acer machines. Besides, I tried that trick with my brother-in-law's Toshiba to try and downgrade(?) this plague of an Operating System.

"I have heard that Vista is a pain, but I've no experience of using it - maybe an on-line computer forum can help? either Acer or a general one???"

Acer will not host a forum, and they've removed everything XP from their "Newer Models" (most of the components in this machine are dated 2005).

Looks like they cobbled several system components from different companies into their Aspire line of computers. This is one machine that Aspires to be a computer.

Most sincere thanks for the help, buddy.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Hi Orpheuse,

last time I booted off Vista, I needed to erase the hdd. I used KD_REAL.EXE in DOS. Don't know if you got a floppy onto Acer but can use a cd from Nero. Good old ZAP.COM that delete to zero the 128 first sectors of the drive. Usually, as long that XP does not catch the ''special Vista partition'' label, you should be in biz.

Did Acer stated about a sata driver for XP? Stuff like OEMx.x? If so, when booting into XP, do F6 and plug the Floppy, or CD, with the driver for sata.

My wife too got an ACER, and the darn Vista is pretty heavy, but she do not want me to ''tweak'' with it! I gess I will have to buy one and test thoses! Hope you get it sir.

Jean Grégoire

Dear Guest,

Thanks for the post. Please take a moment to register so I can give you proper Kudos.

I can feel your frustration. I had to Fisk Vista and it still wouldn't leave. If you go into the <SYSTEM> folders you can change the drive setting from SATA to standard. That got rid of most of Vista.

I'm down to loading specific drivers and, while they don't tell you which driver goes with which equipment, I believe that anything marked . . . <XP_Vista> near the end of the file name should be the driver you're looking for.

Frankly, I can't figure out why Microsoft put in a SATA emulator. on a 120Gig HDD you don't need it. That trick helped a lot.

Good luck with Vista. About half of your XP software will work, even some of the free stuff on CNET. As far as GUI's and overall behavior, Vista looks and feels a lot more like NT 4.0 than the inheritor of XP RC3.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

One of their (M$) favorite tricks is to cripple hardware to run only on their software. They used to do it with modems and printers. The rule of thumb was not to buy a "Winmodem", but pay $10 more for a "real" modem. Same story with printers.

Wasn't there a recent thread here on the topic on dejavu?? I am beginning to feel it!

_____________________________________________________________

FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt). Invented by IBM and stolen by M$ to stiffle competition. In this case they are determined to kill off their own (XP).

Dr. An Wang (short bio excerpt follows). The first real word processing I did was on a Wang system at an Air Force Base. They had a mainframe and we worked from slave units. The Wang OS was far superior to any other word processing software I have ever encountered. True, it did little else, but boy, howdy did it do that well!

"An Wang invented the computer memory core, founded Wang Laboratories, and became known as one of Boston's greatest philanthropists. In the early 1980s, more than 80% of the 2,000 largest U.S. companies used Wang office equipment, and in 1984 Wang Laboratories' profits reached $210 million on sales of $2.2 billion."

Orpheus,

Go into the bios and take the "C" drive out of manual and plug in the parameters of the drive as they are called for. If you do not have that data at hand and you have another computer on line look for the drive manufacturer and get from that web site the specifics for that hard drive.

The reason you can't seem to get rid of Vista is that the bastards section the hard drive and install the basic stuff there. To get rid of it, providing you can get an operating system running is to click on my computer.

That should then show you all the drives on the machine, i.e., "A" drive if one exists, "C" drive, which is your hard drive, and "D" drive which is a section of the "C" drive. When you click on one or the other of those you will find one of them carries all the necessary coding to do the "Restore" function. That is the one you want to wipe out if you really and truly don't want to see Vista again without doing an OEM install which you should be able to do from the discs that came with the box.

Leastwise that's how I have done that and I'm a lot older then you. The experts of course must have a neater less sloppy way to do it.

And as I wrote the above I had another thought on how to do it.

Change directories so that you are looking at the system from inside that special drive directory. Try running format from there, i.e., Format D: or Format C:. Just a thought but I suspect that might work.

Do you know the old DOS system? That is what I revert to when I need to get down in dirty with a machine. But then again I'm not very sophisticated about this stuff, I just do whatever I need to do to get the result I want, unlike other areas where that kind of pragmatism does not cut it.

j.

Still can't figure out why they sectioned the drive. When you try go from an "A:" prompt to a "C:" prompt it kicks out "invalid drive specification". I deleted all the files, first on the D section and then on the C section, then an fdisk and a format.

I still can't figure out why Microsoft didn't release XP-64 edition when Vista fell out of the sky like the Hindenurg.

I finally brought the infernal machine to my Brother-in-law. He's a decent computer tech of the old school, that is to say, he doesn't know why it works but he does know how to crash it and bring it back. Says he just needs to track down the modem driver and we are done. I will believe that when I have the system back and I start loading software.

If you know a prayer for an old programmer, now would be a good time to use it. Or, to go Zen on it, just sit back and have a good laugh.

Thanks for the post and the help.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Dear Jack,

You may call me Ari, or Orpheuse anything but sh**-head, that's my Dad's favorite epitaph for me. It holds a lot of meaning as he still calls me that.

I will not get into an "elderly" contest with you. Anyone who can say that "they are older than me" is probably older than me and it would do me well the hear and heed.

I had to do the BIOS thing well. The entire process takes about a week, and that's because you have to find each driver individually. Install it and test it. I'd rather watch paint dry because you can't leave the system alone for long.

Now, as a test, I should try to install Vista on another machine and see if the techniques we've worked out here will work on other systems - name brand only, unless it's a desktop - 'cause with a desktop you have a bit more leeway - that is, they are not as sensitive and you can open the case.

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, PURCHASE AN OLDER CHIP TO RUN VISTA. A CELERON WILL RUN VISTA BUT IT WILL SLOW THE SYSTEM DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY. Just be aware of that before you buy.

As a caution to the rest of our forum, be prepared and try to buy the same system for everyone so you can make a set of disks for down-grade purposes. Resist a cheaper price if it comes with Vista. Go with Duo Core and 2 Gig's of RAM. You will need it.

Thanks for your reply, Jack. I do appreciate your time.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Thank you D. Robertson. I didn't know that XP Pro SP1 didn't have SATA support. You are right - it did.

/Ari (orpheuse)

If you can confirm that the system boots from an XP installation CD first then maybe you can try this to get the SATA drivers on the the WinXP CD, this site seems to be helpful:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Install-Windows-XP-On-SATA-Without-a-Floppy-F6-47807.shtml

SATA Floppy drivers should (not necessarily would) be found on the ACER site. If not try intel site or google your chipset.

If you are having problems with the Recovery Partition making a mess of things, I heard somewhere that some laptops have settings (Bios maybe? dunno) that protects the recovery partition from being deleted. You can try connecting the laptop HDD to another comp (via an enclosure maybe) and delete it from there. Make sure to back it up before deleting it just in case you want it back someday.

hope this helps!

BÞ

I did that, but I used a free "program" called "The Ultimate Boot C/D for Windows XP" I probably downloaded it from C-Net. Do a search on either ["Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" or "UBCDW"] - leave the qoutation marks in place.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Dear Guest B (symbol/gender unknown),

Don't hope, ask. It did help. Thank you for the time you spent and the site you listed.

You are correct on the Recovery Partition. That was difficult to delete. And I had to remove the HDD, slave it to a different machine and then FDISK and Partition (to NTFS).

You are methodical, in a good way. I made every backup that "ACER Empowering Software" allowed including a Full backup, an Image backup, a system setting backup, a Factory Default backup, and several others. Including 6 DVD's the set stands 1 1/3 inches tall. That includes the initial backup for both Vista and XP Pro. Seems I have some updating to do.

Thank you, my friend, and, please, register so I can give you proper kudos.

/Ari (orpheuse)

In December of 2006 I bought a new notebook because of all the "XP is going away". So, I custom built one on www.HP.com with a 17" superbrite screen and 2GBs RAM and two HDDs and a video card with 512MBs on it. And XP Pro. Works great! Really happy with it.

So, fast forward to December of 2007 and I decide to buy a new desktop. The XP killer had struck and I couldn't get XP Pro on a machine from HP. So, since I have built PCs off and on for 25 years, I thought I would just put XP Pro on it after I received it. Ordered it with Vista Ultimate 32 on it, RAID1, 4GBs RAM, two 500GB HDDs for the RAID1, video card with 512MBs etc.

Played with Vista in Jan 08. Said to myself, "it is time". Dug out a new copy of XP Pro and... TWO MONTHS LATER said F**K it and called them (HP) and got restore disks and put the Vista back on it. (YES, I had messed it up that bad).

Even went so far as to buy a third 500GB HDD and disconnected the two that came in the computer so I could see if I could get XP Pro [w/SP1] on it that way. I did get XP Pro on it, finally, but found that the video card in the computer had drivers available for Vista, but not XP (running a 30" monitor, which is a different story all by itself) and my dreams of having the best of both worlds with a dual boot machine: Vista/XP Pro slowly went away by the time I had put about a hundred hours into messing with it, trying to make a go of it. The cards and motherboard in the computer were made for Vista and that is what it has back on it again. The spare 500GB HDD is lying there for some other machine, already with the XP Pro on it, so it should go into a generic computer just fine (I use the term generic here to mean the pieces used to make the new computer will not start out as a name brand computer, I HAVE learned my lesson about how the board/card makers furnish the name brand computer makers like HP/Toshiba/Acer etc boards made to those companies specs, though the card/board will have their name on it like ATI/ASUS etc, they are NOT the same cards that you buy from Best Buy or Fry's or one of the online parts places like http://www.allstarshop.com etc.)

A person can buy computers from some of the name brand companies that can be downgraded to XP Pro (so they say).

I found the following to be true:

"Changing the Operating System to Windows XP If you decide to change the operating system to Windows XP, here are some important considerations and helpful tips:

So, once I get over the trauma of trying to downgrade a computer from Vista to XP Pro on one the manufacturer never made it to be done on...I will buy some pieces and make another PC to my specs (withOUT Vista on it).

Does Acer say you can downgrade your model/serial number notebook? If not, then I think you are fighting cards/boards maybe just made for Vista by Acer.

So, I have 2 desktops with XP on them, 2 notebooks with XP on them and 1 desktop that doesn't get used much which has Vista on it.

I've built a lot of computers over the years, but this one (the one that came with Vista on it) finally won, it finally got through my head I was not going to start buying new cards and other hardware just to get it to run XP.

Good luck in your quest for making your Acer that came with Vista run XP.

Sell it, find one the factory put XP on and buy it. Or see if Acer will put XP on it for a few hundred dollars.

Ken

Dear Mr. Chevy,

I hope you canabalized that system because it sounds like you got all the right components.

Just follow the stuff we've written here and you will make it. You are going to have to do it anyway. I keep hearing rumors about Windows 7, but NOTHING from any of our spys at M$ as to what Win 7 will be.

Having been in the field for a while now, I think we both know what it will be, so get the native drivers for your system. Those components don't come out of thin air. There has to be a way or we are all well and truly screwed.

That's what's wrong with you college kids, no faith.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

I actually own an acer laptop. The best thing you could have done, and I would still do, is reinstall Vista.

My laptop first with Vista Basic on it and I wanted to put XP on as Vista, at the time, had very little support for gaming and some of the software I used (Mostly my antivirus and some of my system tools). The best way to ever reinstall an OS I have seen is to just put the disc into the drive and from the BIOS, tell the computer to boot to cd first. This will allow you to keep your current configuration installed to at least have a working ocmputer until you get to the formatting/installing section of the boot up process within the Windows you wanted. I did this with my Acer and never had a problem.

Which gets me to my next point... Why does EVERYONE seem to hate Vista? To be honest, yes... When it first came out, it had horrible support for things like games and many useful,everyday programs. It was a memory hog (which it still is), drivers were hard to come by for most not-so-well-known hardware companies, and many programs/games I enjoyed either would not work or BSOD within 10 minutes for me. I understand first impressions last for some, but I ended up putting Vista 64-bit back on my laptop and love it now. I just upgraded the 1-gig of ram that came with it to 4-gigs and now I NEVER see a problem with speed except with some games (which is from the video card not being the best... It was meant for more college use and I did not want to be distracted all the time).

I find that if you upgrade the ram to at least 2-gigs, you have more than enough ram to run Vista. And with computer prices being so cheap for decent to high grade hardware for many things, it is worth it to spend $60 for 4-gigs. Vista also finally fixed many of its issues... So far, I have yet to run into a program where it did not run on Vista. They finally fixed everything with the OS and now people are too against it; this is a shame as Vista actually has some nice little tweaks and small changes I enjoy alot that I think others would learn to love if they gave it another chance.

So why not put Vista back on it and just spend about $50 to uprgade your RAM. If it came with 1-gig, which most laptops not meant for gaming do, you could easily buy another stick of 1-gig RAM for about $30 after S&H online from places like Newegg.com. Either way, the RAM would help speed even if you MUST put XP back on.

Fair warning... 32-bit machines can NOT have more than 3-gig of RAM. It will just not see anymore at all. This is the real reason I put Vista back on as I had a copy of 64-bit Vista. Even if you have a 64-bit CPU, you are still required to have a 64-bit version of the OS you plan on running to be installed to even see anything past 3-gigs of RAM.

Doug's solution is correct. I ran into the same issue. I decided to continue running Vista since all my non-retail copies of XP cannot be traded in for an upgrade. If you own a retail copy, you can request the new CD at the MS website. The other options include making a home made boot disk or buying the latest retail version.

Google "installing Windows XP with SATA drive" and you'll find instructions on how to make a boot disk.

Without knowing everything that you have since I am not there, you should be able to go into the Acer Laptop bios by depressing Del or Esc or F1 or something like that while POSTing (booting) and then tell the bios to boot to your CD-Rom first, then Floppy if it has one but HDD last. Once your done, reboot with your CD Rom filled with your XP disk and the computer should look there first and not for the MBR on HDD. Once XP goes through loading some initial drivers and files you can have your XP disk inspect your drives and completely reformat (use HTFS) your hard drive and load your software unless you have a hardware problem. I have taken these little 2.5 inch drives in and out of laptops for years putting different operating systems on them and such (XP, Linux, Vista, Os/2 warp, etc) and found this to be the best way to overcome issues, Once your loaded with your initial load of XP, go to update (or acer first and get all your xp dirvers) load, reboot then let XP do an update of your system. This should work unless there is real hardware issue someplace. Good Luck Kevin

1. Load Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux.

2. Load VirtualBox or some other flavor of virtualization software.

3. Load a copy of XP Pro in the virtual machine.

For those interested, my displeasure with Vista is the lack of support for legacy applications. To upgrade to Vista would cost me something on the order of $7000 in upgrades to applications...

Hi, CWarner7_11,

Until a Linux Distro is produced that is accepted by the masses I have to maintain a Windows environment as close to theirs as possible so I can support the systems.

Do let me know when we all change over to Linux.

Thank you for your reply,

/Ari (Orpheuse)

This is clearly a case of the blind leading the blind. You need to take the computer to someone and have if setup for you, it is beyond your experience level.

Good Luck

READ THE POSTS!!! YOU'RE THE ONLY BLIND ONE HERE!!!

This is a very basic fix. It's not written anywhere that early XP releases don't contain SATA drivers. This is a very legitimate question.

Why would you suggest taking the computer to a shop and pay "MORE" than a new copy of XP would cost if you did the job yourself?

Why would you suggest taking the computer to a shop and pay

My shop is not very busy and I need the work.

I'm sorry for my previous reply. The answer is "right there" but the poster will not recognise it. I could get his machine running in no time. ...but he just doesn't want to listen.

B.S. I got it. It's running and all of the components work. You just need patience and a forum like this one

Besides, sending the system back to HP, or Acer, or what have you, is only going to get you Vista, and, frankly, I can't afford to reinvest in software I already own. It's not the operating system, per say, it's all of my software. I've been able to use 10 year old software under XP and until they show me that I can still run my software I will continue to waste my time and save my money and hack the heck out of Vista.

This has become personal.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

If there is nothing that you realy dislike in Vista (never used it my self) and this is an issue of the machine not working fast enough you should know that the recomended RAM is 2G so an upgrade is worthy. Even with XP Pro you will run into problems with only 1G RAM.

The issue with Vista, for me, is that I've made significant investments in software and I'm not willing to give it up. When I see as many copies of Vista in the marketplace as I see XP Pro, then I will upgrade to Vista.

The other annoying idiosyncrasy with Vista is that, as usual, the programmers moved things around, which was unnecessary, and calls certain things by names other than the ones used in XP.

Besides, do you want to fiddle around with a new operating system or do you want to preform useful tasks that people will pay you for? An operating system is supposed to be invisible to the end user and Vista is anything but invisible, and that's what I can't allow. Users don't want to learn Vista and there aren't enough people using Vista yet to form the critical mass needed for tipping the Computer Industry in that direction, yet.

Ultimately, we will have to learn Vista or something just like it, but today is not that day. For now, get yourself the bare bones version and learn Vista, but I wouldn't upgrade a customer if I didn't have to. Works out cheaper all around.

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Congratulations one and all. My Acer is up and running Windows XP Pro and all of my components are working better than the original specs.

As far as this thread is concerned, I consider the case closed. Please feel free to hang out and play, I've got downloading to do.

To everyone who took part in this thread, I thank you all, most sincerely, for your advise, your tips, your tricks, and, especially, your sense of humor.

I remain, ever your friend,

/Ari

(Orpheuse)