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    Aspire 5100-3583 rebuild - questions

    Discussion in 'Acer' started by darksong, Nov 27, 2006.

  1. darksong

    darksong Newbie

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    I picked up one of these beasts from Circuit City after doing a lot of research trying to get the most bang for my buck for a laptop. As usual, the manufacturer loads all kinds of "quality" *cough* software on the system, which just slows it down, and I need to flatten it and rebuild from scratch. I have a few questions, if some people would be kind enough to help.

    Apologies if some was covered elsewhere, but I worked all night, am fighting off the Flu, and only have until this Friday if I am unhappy and want to return this laptop.

    Okie, here we go!

    1) I have the XP Pro install media ready, and I downloaded all the drivers from the German Acer FTP. After checking the device manager to see what is active I think all I need to install, driver-wise is the following:

    Atheros 802abg wireless
    acerpm power managment (perhaps not needed?)
    Realtek audio
    cardreader/cardbus
    ATI chipset
    SMC FIR (not sure what this is)
    Realtek Lan (Broadcom shows up with a red X in device manager)
    Modem
    Touchpad

    Am I missing any essentials ones to install ?

    2) Bios says is version 2.0 - is there any pressing reason to update to 2.4?

    3) I burned the 2 DVDs for the factory reinstall like it nagged me to. If I was to do an install of XP, and reclaim/reformat ALL partitions, would these restore disks allow me to reset the HD back to how it was from factory, including the D2D feature on this 3rd "hidden" partition?

    4) is there a way to disable the OS automatically reinstalling the built-in ATI video driver? I tried removing it, rebooting, and installing the Omega drivers, but it kept reinstalling the ATI ones in the background, and I had to boot in "force VGA" to remove Omega's to get video output in windows. The link to the modded Cat 6.11 that will support 1100-series is dead atm.

    I think that covers all the pressing priority questions I had. I'll sift thru the existing threads for the tips how to best optimize the laptop for performance after I do a reload.

    Basically, I'm trying to wring every bit of FPS out of this beast for playing WoW. Right now in lowest rez, with ALL effects turned off or down all the way, and lowest video mode, the best I can do is like 28FPS in "sane detail" areas.

    Thanks, any help will be greatly appreciated!
     
    darksong, Nov 27, 2006
    #1