ferrari 1000 and windows 7

Has anyone tried installing windows 7 on their ferrari 1000? How has your experience with it been? Can you get everything such as the orbi cam, wi-fi, etc. working? I'm on linux now and am pretty intrigued by what windows 7 has to offer. I want to try it out but Acer doesn't have any drivers available yet.

 

haven't tried final, but RC is working. all drivers can be loaded, however the webcam can be a bit tricky.

performance is good, very responsive if you have the memory.

Acer won't be offering any drivers for W7 on the ferrari, but you can still find drivers that work.

One note though, install W7 via usb thumb drive or usb optical drive. W7 changed the firewire driver and will install to a point, after rebooting it will just bluescreen.

So, if you load it, change the firewire (SBP2) driver back to legacy and it will work fine.

 

Thanks! I'll definitely give it a try after I backup and upgrade my memory.
If you don't mind me asking,
How and where did you find working drivers?

(sorry, I got used to 'apt-get install'-ing everything on linux.. lol)

 

use regular ATI catalyst drivers for chipset, video
TI card reader, version 2.0.0.9 (enables SDHC compatibility)
Audio, use default windows drivers or download newest from realtek
FIR, use the vista driver
webcam, use vista driver, but you will have to manually load driver (not using setup)
LAN, wireless and wired. used built in driver or just use the broadcom drivers. both use a UDA, so one driver package will usually contain multiple cards.

touchpad, generic synaptics
bluetooth, use broadcom bluetooth update utility (google btwupdate)

That's about it.

 

how do you load the webcam driver manually?

 

I recently upgraded my Acer 1000 to 4GB of ram (from 2GB).

It was running Windows 7 and things seemed to be fine.

After upgrading to 4GB I also put in a new larger HD and reimaged the machine because I was running out of space on the previous HD.

Unfortunately with the new setup up the Windows 7 environment has become very flaky. The problems start to show up after using the laptop for a while as windows not repainting correctly .

I have the last version of the ATI driver that was released for the 1000 from Acer and reinstalled that, so that wasn't different from the previously more stable Win 7 install.

So I did a test and pulled one of the new 2GB memory modules out and tried opening up a few instances of Expression Blend 4 (which would melt down fairly consistently in the last config). With 2GB it seems stable.

So I repeated the test a few times and sure enough things melt down pretty fast on my Acer 1000 running Windows 7 64bit with 4GB but they seem pretty stable with 2GB.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the Acer 1000 to play nice with 4GB or RAM on Windows 7 64bit?
Does anyone have any idea why it screws up with 4GB?
I would be happy even if it just used the 3.5 or so GB that it says is useable (although I thought I had read that Win 7 64bit could go beyond that limit).

 

One other thing that I noticed which seems to break when I boot with 4GB instead of 2GB is the Acer Empower Framework utilitiy.

"Acer Empowering Techonolgy Framework Launcher has stopped working."
"A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available."

I get a direct cause and effect relationship when I switch between 2GB and 4GB or back again and then reboot. When the machine has 4GB this utilitly (and other issues like window video repaints) break and when it has 2GB the utility runs fine and the system seems to work.

I have tried a few alternative bios settings for Video Memory: but that didn't help.

I have also tried alternating the order of the two 2GB Kingston KAC-MEMF/2G memory modules and the both seem to work fine independantly but things blow up when both are installed (regardless of order), so I believe the two mem modules are ok.

While on the subject of the bios, one other thing that I notice which seems odd is that the Bios Main screen seems to report incorrectly with 4GB installed if I check the bios screens on any boot up after the first one following the insertion of the second memory module.

2GB installed shows:
System Memory: 633 KB
Extended Memory: 1918 MB

but 4GB installed shows:
System Memory: 633 KB
Extended Memory: 5375 MB
or sometimes (I think just the first boot after installing 2nd module)
System Memory: 633 KB
Extended Memory: 3966 MB

and of course it doesn't allow you to adjust those numbers. So it appears that at least some of the time the bios thinks that there is 6GB installed or something. I'm not sure how the bios is getting persuaded after the first boot with 4GB that it suddenly has 6GB on each boot there after.

It is a real drag to not be able to operate the machine with 4GB of RAM in Windows 7.

 

Hi,

could be a bad memory module. You may try memtest86 (or the built-in memtest of Win7) to check the modules.

Michael

 

bios 3204 should be installed.

 

Thanks TechieDiva!

I was pretty sure that I had previously upgraded the BIOS and just figured that it was the latest, but I see that I do indeed have an ealier version
v0.3128

So with any luck the BIOS upgrade will do the trick.

But now my problem is that the version of WinPhlash that comes with the downlaod seems to be a Vista version or something and will not allow me to actually do the flashing. It keeps whining about Cannot load driver... Error code:1275
I am logged in as administrator and I have also tried specifically running the utility as administrator and in a system cmd window as admin but no luck.

Does anyone know of an easy way to update the bios on a machine with Windows 7 64 bit running on it?

 

Wow, I wrestled with this all day with no success so I submitted a web question to the Acer support folks.

I received one of the lamest responses that I have seen from support people and when I tried to reply to their "solved" support issue (which was totally not solved) their web system mysteriously throws an error with no useful error message.

So not impressed with the Acer provided support on this.

If anyone has any insight on how to flash the latest BIOS version onto a Ferrari 1000 once Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit is installed it would be much appreciated.

I am not sure if it is an issue with permissions or with the 64 bitness or maybe some hardcoded "must be Vista" thing but I was not able to get WinPhlash.exe to do its thing.

Thanks.

 

I would not blame support because you can't flash a bios.

try flashing in dos, probably the easiest way.

also don't rule out bootable PE OS diagnostic discs, you should be able to use winplash in those as well.

if all else fails, take it to a tech and have them flash the bios.

 

Techiedeva, I am not sure what you meant by your suggestionto flash in dos. I totally get what that used to mean in pre Vista/Win 7 days but I am not sure how it still applies or if it is even still an option. I am also sceptical if the winphlash.exe application would run in actual dos. As I mentioned, it wasn't working in the command window. I attempted to get a basic Windows PE boot disk happening by downloading and installing AIK but there seem to be a lot of hoops to jump through to get that to work and I came up with a plan B before getting the windows pe thing to work.

Well it turns out that the Bios issue is due to the 64 bitness.
Plan B: after finding a drive that I could wipe and install a 32 bit flavour of Win 7 on, I was able to run the supplied version of winphlash.exe to upgrade the bios.

I am not sure I understand why Acer only provides a 32 bit Vista version of winphlash.exe with the bios upgrade for a 64 bit laptop, but the bios upgrade issue is now solved for me.

Unfortunately 3204 version of the bios does not seem to truely solve the 4 GB issue that I was originally experiencing.

Grant it, it does look like the bios might be correctly reporting the 4 GB of ram on the Main screen now (I only did limited tests), however the Empower Technology Framework untility still crashes when booting with 4 GB and the environment again looses stability which first shows up as window paint issues.

So rolled back to 2 GB.

Is anyone out there sucessfully running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with 4 GB on their Ferrari 1000?

 

sounds like you have bad memory.

 

Perhaps, but I have run the built in Windows 7 memory test on a number of different configurations of the modules and each of the configurations I have tried so far have passed the Extended Memory test.

I went back and dug up my previous 1 GB modules which came in the machine originally. I took one of them and added it in with one of the 2 GB putting the total at 3 GB. I realize that mixing mem modules introduces issues of its own where differences between the size, speeds etc.. can cause incompatibilities.

However, the system seems to run with 3 GB in it, but the Empower Technology Framework still dies immediately after boot.

I notice your signature line shows you as running 4 GB in a Ferrari 1000, but that you are (or maybe were) running the RC version of Windows 7. Are you still on the release candidate or did you upgrade to the release version?

Also if you don't mind me asking.... do you have the Acer Empower Technology Framework utilities installed with the toolbar on your desktop?

For some reason on my system those utilites don't like my 3 or 4 GB memory configurations.

The error message that I get is simply "Acer Empower Technology Framework Launcher has stopped working" which isn't much help. When it kicks into VS debugging it shows

An unhandled exception ('System.OverlowException') occurred in Acer.Empowering.Framework.Supervisor.exe [2996].

The call stack mentions Acer.Empowering.Framework.Presenter as the source but without the debug version of the code and knowledge of the source there isn't much more I can tell from the debugger.

Rolling back to 2 GB of RAM is one way to avoid the Empower Framework from crashing, but I would still not be benifiting from the additional memory.

Interesting that the BIOS upgrade did change the behaviour of the system by correcting the reported memory issue. That would suggest that there at least was some issue with the Ferrari 1000 being upgraded to 4 GB. Too bad it doesn't seem to solve the issue.

 

hi i guys, ive got the same laptop(ferrari 1000) but need dont know how to get a new hard drive/memory or how to install it( the most ive dont is install a new os on a comp) ive never actually opened it.. does any1 have any tips? or should i jus giv it to a tech company to sort out.. im in liverpool can any1 recommend any? thanks for any help