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.
Saturday May 3
12:42
Microbrewery Beer In Tokyo
Jon’s blog is slowly becoming my event planner for Tokyo. He tipped me off to the Punchline Comedy event a few weeks ago, and now again to the Japan Craft Beer Association festival this Monday/Tuesday.
I adore microbrewery beer, and especially love searching out Japanese microbreweries. While in Seoul, I know around 10 bars which brew their own beer on the premises, in Tokyo I know of only one, and two in Osaka. Thankfully there are some awesome microbrewery beers available in The Aldgate near where I live, Nest is available in What The Dickens, and Yamaya and Tokyu Food Store both have a small range of the more commercial varieties. The Tokyu Food Show site is in Japanese only, but the store is easy to find in the basement of Shibuya station - just be careful not to assume the supermarket on the ground level is the Tokyu Food Show.
I really must get out to the countryside and visit some of the microbreweries direct. I hear many of them have “drink as much as you want for 3000 yen” deals - which would be lethal :)
Friday May 2
14:28
Retail Therapy
I bought some computer goodies yesterday.
First was a new laptop: Acer Aspire 5520 AS5520-7A1G16.
Second was new memory (2GB) for said laptop, raising the specs to:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (Dual Core) 1.9GHz
3GB Memory
160GB HDD
DVD burner
15.4″ screen
This isn’t a “power laptop” - I don’t play games - but for the price I think it’s amazing value: 69200 yen, about 665 USD, for a dual-core machine with 3GB memory. I paid nearly 3 times that for my Intel 2GHz Dual Core / 2GB laptop 2 years ago.
The reason for buying it at first was to replace the little Kohjinsha SA1 that sits beside me at work, to surf the internet, check email, etc. The Kohjinsha is great for travel, but using it with logmein to connect to my home PC is a pain: 800×600 screen trying to display a 1280×800 screen - not nice.
However, I’m going to benchmark it against my machine at home first. If there’s little difference (Intel Dual Core 2GHz, 2GB memory), I’m going to use the new machine at home. Not only will I appreciate the larger screen for viewing photos, but I’ll be able to get all my iTunes on the internal drive. My current home machine is also smaller, so it will fit better on my desk at work. In honesty, I want a nice desktop machines with multiple monitors at home - but I’m trying to resist that, because I don’t want to have yet more junk to carry from country to country. If this machine performs well, it’ll make it easier to resist splashing out :)
Speaking of small: Third purchase - new memory for my little Kohjinsha SA1.
I had no idea memory prices were so cheap these days.The 2GB for the Acer was just 4400 yen, about 40USD - that’s nothing.
My SA1 has been struggling running XP with 512MB and its little 500MHz AMD Geode chip. While looking for the Acer memory, I just happened to search for memory for the SA1 out of interest. If I’d known I could have upped the memory to 1GB for just 6000 yen, I’d have done it months ago. I’ll never get over the limitations of the processor - but for the price of 6 pints of beer, XP can now breathe.
The Acer hasn’t arrived yet - they will deliver it on Sunday. It comes with Japanese Home Vista Premium, so my first task, after slotting in the extra memory, will be either installing XP or an English version of Vista.
Links:
Acer Aspire 5520 AS5520-7A1G16 laptop (with 1GB memory): biccamera.com. Price is 64,800yen until the end of this weekend.
This laptop is not available in the shops, so with the help of Google Translate, I had to buy it online. What astounded me is that even though the website is Japanese only, when I phoned them up to confirm the delivery date after buying, I was able to talk with a guy who speaks fluent English. And they’re delivering on a Sunday. Cool.
Memory: Ark in Akihabara, found from Kakaku.com price matching site.
Kakaku is a brilliant site - I check the price of everything electronic there before I buy.
Ark is a shop that I didn’t know about before, though I knew the street it’s in. As well as very cheap prices on memory, I noticed they also have 4GB SDHC cards for 1,770 Yen - that’s almost giving them away!
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A Manga Guide to Akihabara