Acer Aspire 7520 Questions

Hi There,

I've recently bought the 7520, and at the moment everything is working hunky dory. In fact, it is quite a good machine.

I've made myself both a full bootable recovery disk, and a disk with all the drivers and applications. The only bugbear for me is the customizability that I want to do. I have never owned a laptop before, preferring my desktop pc which I have upgraded to a wonderful, powerful beast.

I bought the laptop so I could be elsewhere in my home and be connected to the net via TP-Link. Even this works great and at full speed. So, currently no problem.

Obviously the OS is Vista 32 bit, which I want to downgrade to XP. On the Acer website there are no XP drivers for the inner components of the 7520, and I am assuming that all the Acer bumpf like 'enet' and 'empowerment', etc, are part and parcel of the drivers...or are they simply Acer software which you can delete without any degredation to the operability of the system?

The truth is, I want my laptop to be a mirror microcosm of my desktop pc. Is it possible for me to downgrade to XP, but beforehand, to find and backup the proper XP drivers for the inner components of my laptop before I attempt to do so?

All advice and links to the appropriate XP drivers for my laptop would be greatly appreciated.

Best wishes

 

http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/fo...cerPanAm.com&siteid=7117&areaid=2&formid=3394

 

Link above looks good, seems to be XP drivers there. If they aren't all there the best bet would be to go to the manufacturer of the devices and download the drivers from their own website.

I find that the empowerment software Acer provides is bloatware. You can pretty much find everything the acer software does within windows. Some people keep it and find it useful, but a lot do remove it as it serves no real purpose. If your keeping vista on there it may be worth keeping the eRecovery on there.

If you do end up installing XP on the machine, there is one very important factor you must bear in mind. Once you install it, you will delete the Acer Master Boot Record (MBR). There is a restore utility that works outside windows and can be started by pressing ALT+F10 when you power up the system, this can be useful if your backup disks are damaged or you forget to burn them and will restore your system back to the factory default, but once you install a non acer supplied OS, this deletes the acer mbr and renders this function useless. If your installing XP, you may not be to bothered, but thought I would point this out anyway

 

I don’t know what sir bangert was trying to say but while installing xp don’t even touch hidden partition called pqservice.

 

Was a bit long winded.

Basically if you install XP, you won't be able to use the ALT+F10 function to recover the system.

 

Hi There,

Many thanks for the replies, links, and advice, especially for leaving the hidden partition intact. If I were to find the XP drivers for the inner components of the 7520, I think for now, all I'm going to do is to save then to disk. I going to try and get used to the Vista, and learn how to tweak it to my satisfaction.

The laptop is a good machine, and all I will be using it for will be for wireless internet, and my writing. So, after reading your good responses, I think I'd be better off leaving the machine as it is, and research up on Vista.

Once again...many thanks

 

Have a look at this thread, a vista tip and tweaks guide, may be of use to you.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

 

I think that you can use Alt+F10 after changing pqservice to bootable partition.