Monday May 5
 
03:44
 
I Tried – I Really Tried

I really did try to give vista a chance. I really wanted to love the sidebar which showed the weather. I tried to smile when it took 10 minutes to unzip a 62MB file. But the last straw came when the NVidia graphics driver kept crashing every five minutes with “nvlddmkm stopped responding”.

How on earth could Acer sell a laptop with a driver that continually crashes?

So it’s now 3am, and I’ve just finished wiping the hard drive and installing XP.

For any Acer 5520 (or other Acer model) users in Japan, here are some tips:

1. Vista Ultimate allows you to switch language from Japanese to English using the MUI language packs. Home Premium does not. If you’re going to stick with Vista and want to change Home Premium to English, get Vistalizer. Just remember to change the language back to Japanese before installing SP1.

2. Vista doesn’t give up without a fight. The 5520 (and other Acers) has SATA drivers which no XP install CD can find. This page describes how to install XP on the Acer Aspire 5520 if you have a floppy drive – but I don’t. Instead I downloaded the files as recommended, extracted them using WinImage, then used NLite to create a new WinXP CD which contains the drivers. XP installed with no problem. This page provided all the XP drivers required for the 5520 after installation.

I cannot describe how much of a combination of pleasure and pain Vista was. On the one hand, I wanted a nice glossy toy to play with. On the other, it just felt so slow and buggy – aside from the display issue, I’d need to upgrade Photoshop, DVD Region Free, and probably a whole lot more.

It’s amazing to think that a single piece or hardware, which is make fully and 100% functional by XP, is crippled so severely by Vista. I only wish Apple would release MacOs X for PCs – they could take over the world.

As an aside, I’m deeply disappointed by Acer as a company. Not only does the NVidia driver crash continually under Vista, but Acer have plastered a “Warranty void if seal broken” sticker over the memory slot access. If you want to upgrade memory, you lose all warranty – unbelievably confirmed by a phone call to Acer. Luckily for me, I have a Bic Camera 3 year warranty (coast about 30 USD) and BC confirmed that they will still cover the warranty if I upgrade the memory myself and break the seal.

I really dont get how a company can advertise a machine as 1GB upgradeable to 4GB, and then tell you after purchase that if you want to do the upgrade, you will lose your warranty. They even include upgrade instructions in the user manual. Very dodgy.