Vista Ahoy

I downloaded a copy of Vista Ultimate a while ago (let’s just say torrented) and recently installed it. I didn't really know what to expect from it, I’ve used it before for short periods of time and was annoyed with how things are rearranged from XP. I was a bit wary after hearing all the things people say about it online and I have a friend with a Sempron and although I can't say for sure whether it was due to Vista or another problem such as the laptop itself it was slow, real slow.

I'll start by saying that the computer I will be installing Vista on is a Acer laptop that has had numerous conflicts and problems using a combination of XP with a plethora of Acer utilities that serve little purpose other than to add bloat and cause errors some of which may not be immediately associated with the Acer utilities.

The installation process was simple and required answering a few questions and partitioning the drive before installing. The installation took about 30-60 minutes to fully setup and takes me to the desktop.

One of the first things I noticed in exploring Vista is that all the applications Acer bundles with all their laptops have even less place in Vista than they did in XP. Vista comes with pretty much all the functionality of the Acer utilities.

Vista seems faster than XP, this is probably due to not having all the Acer applications slowing it down, but either way it's good.

Vista included working drivers for everything in my laptop apart from a card reader and a webcam, both drivers were found reasonably easily on the Acer website.

By default all Acer laptops come with three separate partitions, one is a PQSERVICE partition that cannot be modified. This contains the Acer equivalent of HP's useless (temporary) tattoo that allows you to install the OS that comes with the PC. It also comes with two partitions: C:\ and D:\ halving disk space. In my case both partitions were FAT32. Not seeing the purpose of this arrangement I decided to use the Disk Managers Shrink and Extend functionality to shrink D:\ to 2GB and increase the C:\. Wanting to keep the drive as a Basic disk I found I had to create an extra partition with the space freed from D:\ and play Tower of Hanoi to make the free space sequential to C:\ so that I could expand the C:\.

Overall Vista is pretty good, and while some people have problems with it; I personally haven't had any trouble and after getting used to the new locations of things I’ve become pretty happy with it and I won’t be going back to XP unless I have to.

The Return of the Laptop

My laptop arrived back recently, after 9 weeks of being "repaired".
Some points i'm dissapointed with in particular:

• It took 9 weeks to get back to me, the hell?
  
• The lid of the laptop is scratched pretty badly, thankfully the screen is alright.
• There was a bit of oil on some of the keys.
• I found a worm, a few Trojans and downloaders.

The Trojans are somewhat worrying, although since I connected it to the internet before I had a proper firewall installed I can't be sure if they are there from a Windows exploit, or a malicious technician working for Acer.
Thankfully after I replaced Windows Firewall with Comodo Firewall I was able to see the applications try hooking into Internet Explorer and directly accessing the internet and remove them; helped by a Avast! boot time scan and a Spybot S&D scan.

Acer Support Sucks

Agh, Acer support is terrible! This is the fifth or sixth week after I have sent away my laptop for repair (of what I think is a issue with their software).


Start, Week 1: Sent away Laptop
End, Week 1: Rang Acer, they claim they JUST recieved the Laptop. Fair enough.

End, Week 2: They were still "repairing" the Laptop.

End, Week 3: The Laptop had reportedly finished being repaired and was being sent back to me.

End, Week 4: After 4 weeks of being "repaired" I was told for some reason the Laptop was in transit overseas for reasons unkown.


It's been a further two weeks now since I last rang, i'm starting to think they've lost the Laptop or simply don't care; Beware Acer products, if they break or are damaged then you've just wasted your money. Avoid.

http://avoidacer.com Apparently Acer support sucks regardless of where you are in the world.

Bye Bye Laptop

After not only crashing, but now returning a BSOD on every boot I decided I had enough.
I rang Acer support and am now getting the laptop sent away due to possible heat damage.

Therefore I am now using my desktop for everything until the Laptop returns. :(
It's weird how everything looks so different without wide-screen and all the other differences my laptop makes.

I also forgot how slow and crapped up my desktop was.

Acer Laptop Woes

I'll start by saying this is not the first time this has happened to me, I solved the problem before by formatting; but as that was when I first got it I didn't mind as much as I do now.

As sometimes happens I left my Acer 5672WLMi laptop on and I fell asleep, when I woke back up and checked up on the Laptop the screen had turned black.

Restarting the computer solved nothing as the XP logon screen was covered with static and all sorts of graphical errors.
Booting into safe mode worked so I ran a system restore and rebooted into Windows. Hurray! I am now able to boot into Windows! But before I could get myself into a celebratory mood Windows started it's glitching and disabling the backlight/freezing.

I went back into safe mode and used msconfig to put the computer into "Diagnostic Startup" and reboot, XP happily logged on and even after finishing loading it didn't freeze/die!
But as a computer is pretty empty without any services/applications running I eliminated the options of what the problem could be, turning things on one at a time.

First I enabled System.ini and Win.ini as those are core Windows components, then Services, then Startup items.
Once I found the problem to be contained in the startup options I started a process of elimination by turning on things like the Firewall and Antivirus.

But I had a thought while I was doing this, the problem occurs after a time of startup; now what starts up last on the laptop? The ATi application!
As it turns out cli.exe was causing the static/glitching/graphical errors/freezing/etc and the laptop runs happily without it.

As a summary for people having the same trouble: Use safe mode to do a System Restore and msconfig to disable the 'cli' startup entry.

Now I still have the problem of why it's doing this, I was unable to find any related problems through Google or searching forums so it's still somewhat of a mystery for me.
I will try a update of the graphics driver even though it is limited by acer, this problem is somewhat bugging me so I will try to find a proper solution.

Laptop Mania

I got myself a Laptop this week, I got a Acer Aspire 5672WLMi that says Aspire 5670 on the monitor part.
Acer did what it usually did and formatted my one 100GB HDD into two 30GB FAT32 partitions and a 'QTPARTION' recovery partition.
This is apparently pointless as NTFS is better than FAT32 in everything but speed and having one 60+GB partition would've been a lot better than two smaller ones.
The installer installs a lot of crap onto the laptop that while beneficial, are not needed; Fortunately Norton 2006 was the only software that served no purpose for me.
The Laptop came with Windows XP SP2 installed, but newer ones will come with Vista.