Acer Extensa 4420 Questions

Hey everyone, I was wondering if you any of you could answer a few questions I had about the Acer Extensa 4420 (the 5239 in particular). First off, I can find no documentation about this model anywhere except for the site (Office Depot) that is selling it. There isn't a hint of it on the Acer website either. Is this common with Acer or perhaps this is a new model? I have seen some with Intel processors, but this is AMD.

Moving on from that, has anyone had any experience with this model or a similar one (Athlon 64 @ 1.9, 2GB Ram, 120gb HD @ 5400 RPM, ATI 1250 graphics)? I want to use this as a development rig for my web apps. I plan on stripping off vista (yuck) and loading Ubuntu 8.04 and then doing html, xml, java(script), php, etc development on it. Nothing graphically intensive, I have a workhorse dell for multimedia. Can this computer handle it? Does it have any known issues? And thanks to everyone for their input.

 

Welcome to NBR

You can get Extensa 4420 User's Guide from here.

I don't have this model so I really can't tell you how well it would handle Ubuntu...I have Aspire 5715Z and I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 x64 (hardy) and the only problem I have so far is video related but I have Intel x3100 IGP and Ubuntu(and Compiz) has known issues with this IGP..But I think that with ATI you won't have any problems..

 

Thank you very much for the welcome and the help. I really don't expect to do anything that intensive and the size and components are a great deal for $450. If I really need power, I'll just use my dell but this should serve the purpose.

 

I recently purchased an Acer Extensa 4420 and I've got the Ubuntu 8.04 on it. I was doing fine with sensational graphics and 3D effects until I decided to attach a 19" monitor. That's when issues started to happen with video. The laptop would be fine, but the attached monitor would be in widescreen mode or something and it didn't pinched everything together because my monitor is not a widescreen but a squarescreen. In order to get optimal resolution on both displays (laptop and attached display) I had to change the driver out (using something called Envy) and then do about 10 hours of messing with my xorg.conf file until I finally conquered it. But now I have to use one xorg.conf file for when I boot with the attached monitor, and one xorg.conf file when on the road without the flat panel display attached.

So I have everything working on video except for the annoying xorg.conf swapout depending on mode, and I have a lockup every time I choose logout for some reason. The lockups require CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to fix, but that could corrupt a file if I'm not careful, right? (Guessing on that file corruption thing.)

I then want to get any kind of bluetooth activity working at all, and it doesn't look like it's working. The drivers don't work, I guess.

Did you also notice that they screwed up the hardware with the wireless light? It's inverted to orange when it's supposed to be green. It still works quite well, however.

I couldn't find how to get the Euro key to work, nor how to get the $ key to display the British Pound -- that would be quite useful for me with my international clients in Europe.

I read a lot of advice not to install the AMD64 version of Ubuntu 8.04 on the Acer 4420, but have not confirmed if that's an issue. I'm running the regular version on it instead. Seems to run just fine.

I tried playing Sauerbraten and it sort of works except that the screen refreshes are flashing white every so many cycles.

Suspend by closing the laptop lid does fail.

Ubuntu's laptop team reviewed the 4420 and here's what they found:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/AcerExtensa4420

However, he could also be wrong in some areas, and a system update might fix an issue here or there.

Anyway, see my posts on the Extensa 4420 on ubuntuforums.org as "supermike".

 

Greetings,

I've recently upgraded my 4420 to Vista Enterprise 64-Bit version. I wanted 64 bit so I could use as much of the 4gb RAM I have installed as possible, unfortunately I was hoping for more than 3.75 but I'll take it! I chose Enterprise, well, because I have it on volume license and it serves me well.

Anyway, after all of the usual headaches, I was able to install the proper drivers for all of the devices with the exception of the WLAN adapter. For the life of me I cannot (I guess I could open it back up and check the physical card) figure out what adapter this is and find the drivers. Acer support site (which I loathe) offers Atheros or Broadcom drivers -- neither of which work. The specs form says I have a "Acer Invilink" 802.11bg adapter -- for which I cannot find any drivers.

Ideas??

Thx ~ A

 

That's one of the problems with going 64-bit, my friend, and why a lot of people don't do it -- lack of supplemental drivers for everything else on their system. I think you'll have better luck with Ubuntu Linux for this sort of thing, but you'll have to get used to its interface. At least with Ubuntu, they ship you the discs for free from their website form and it's about the friendliest Linux there is. Or, switch to a Mac (and get used to fewer apps and vendor-lockin).

At most, all I can suggest is that you fill out the official Acer tech support form on this one and wait on a response. That's what I did and they emailed me back after waiting a week. Oh, and I had to fill out the form twice, with the second one being a complaint about a lack of response, before they answered me.

 

ACER doesn't provide 64bit drivers for WLAN for Extensa 4420.

http://www.atheros.cz/

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/