Just bought 1681, now what about the HD?

Hello all,

First post, but I am a long time lurker as I decided on a laptop to buy. I finally bought the 1681 from newegg over the weekend when it got down to below 1300, and am anxious to get my hand on the thing!

However, I do have a simple question. I have purchased a copy of XP Pro through my university bookstore very cheap, and would like to put it on the laptop and get rid of XP home. At the same time, I was hoping to fix the hard drive partition situation.

Could someone with some experience in the matter tell me the easiest way to do both these thing, preferably at the same time?? Thanks, and I will report back as to what I think of the machine (hopefully) in a short while.

RadMan

 

Congratulations on your purchase Radman! Would like to hear your thoughs/experiences with buying/using the notebook.

If you bought XP Pro, you should be able to install it w/o any problems. Just make sure you download all the drivers on their website for this unit and burn to CD. The worst thing to reload your system and not have any drivers.

The HDD Partition issue is easily fixed when you install the OS, it'll ask you if you want to format, just say yes and you'll have 1 huge NTFS partition. You can manually create partitions if you want, but it defaults to 1 large partition.

-Vb-

 

Thanks! I am excited, my computer should be here today or tomorrow.

Just a few couple more questions, will there be a disc that comes with the laptop that has all the drivers on it?? I was having a tough time finding them on the Acer website (of course, probably because I do not know where to look!).

Also, my version of XP Pro is fairly old, is it worthwhile to download the XP service pack from Microsoft?

Someone mentioned on here that the video card runs better with different drivers, is this true?

Thanks for all the info.

 

Hi,
Check this out:
ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_1680/
This is in case if you will have difficulties finding those drivers on your HDD.
It should not be a difference if you download SP1 from MS or buy XP SP1, although I have an impression that in first case size of the Windows folder would be bigger a little bit.

In return. Please clarify the situation with the speakers of the 1681, is this stereo or mono?

 

If you have the verison of XP Pro that doesn't have SP1 already included, you may want to checkout a patch to protect your system from the Blaster Worm virus. My cousin installed it into his PC, connected to the web to update to SP1 and he got hit by the virus. Goto the Symantec site and download the patch.

The video drivers you're talking about are the Omega drivers and the ATI drivers (from the ATI Site) utilizing the Mobility Mod. These drivers can provide better performance than your stock/Acer supplied drivers. The Omega Drivers have been tweaked to give you that extra bit of performance. Also, you can use the RadLinker utility to overclock your GPU, but you should be careful, you can fry your system if you push it too much.

-Vb-

 

Thanks for all the tips.

I will get my machine tomorrow. I don't think I will mess with the video drivers too much, since I do not do much PC gaming.

A friend a work told me today that I can't use the XP Pro CD I have because I have already put it on one computer. Interesting... I do not remember ever registering it.

Perhaps I am stuck with XP Home for the time being, although I still want to fix the hard drive.

Of course, I will post my opinions on the machine once I get it. Thanks again.

Rad Man

 

Since this machine only come with XP Home, I don't think you can legally install XP Pro onto this system, unless the OS hasn't been activated yet or if it's installed on 1 system at a time. if it has already been activated, you just have to call Microsoft to activate it on the new system. This should be OK, since people are expected to upgrade their systems.

To fix the HDD partition issue, you can buy a copy of Partition Magic. This will allow you to change the partition sizes & even the file system type (Fat32, NTFS, etc...). This is probably one of the best utilities on the martket for this purpose.

-Vb-