ILuvJohn

One of my friends wrote a book and I created a small, simple website for him to sell his book and refer people to. I thought that I could help spread the word a little bit by writing about his book.

It is titled, Audacity of Common Sense and Scripture By Joseph Russo. As one might think at first, yes it is in a sort of sarcastic reference to Obama’s book, Audacity of Hope.

In Joseph Russo’s Book he uses common sense and scripture to show and explain where we should be headed in our lives and in our government.

The quotes he uses are unforgettable and meaningful - Something we can trust. Of what I know of the author, his personal strengths and courage outweigh that of most men I know as well as my own. So I am not so hesitant to listen to what his book is sharing.
Quotes such as:

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”
- Cesare Beccaria, quoted by Thomas Jefferson

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty not safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
- Ronald Reagan

If you are interested in reading his book, please check it out at http://josephrusso.net/ and tell others about it to! If you have read the book please comment below!

In my last post I ranted a bit on why Windows 7 is the worst OS of all time, to date. Now, I am going to walk you through my experience on installing Windows XP on my Acer Aspire 5517-5671.

• Backup anything you want to save to an external HD or internet/network location. Download this torrent and burn the files to a CD. (Need help with torrents? They are simple, fast, convenient and secure!) You will need these drivers for your Acer Aspire 5517 to work properly with Windows XP. As well, you will need WinRar to “unzip” the drivers. These drivers are for your wireless card, LAN / Ethernet, Video Adapter, Sound Card, USB etc etc. You may not be able to use a USB Flash drive because the PC will not be able to communicate to the USB drives upon a fresh install pre-SP1. Some work, and some dont.
• Shutdown/restart and press F2 to get into your bios.  On the “Main” tab / page, at the bottom, there is a setting called SATA Mode. Change it From AHCI Mode to IDE Mode. If you don’t do this, you may get the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) while installing Windows XP. Don’t exit the BIOS yet, one more setting to change.
• Switch over to the “Boot” tab in the BIOS Screen. Use the plus and Minus (+ & -) keys to put the CD / DVD drive at the top (Mine was IDE1), and the Hard drive right below it (Mine was IDE0). Now place your Windows XP installation disk in your CD/DVD drive, then go to the exit tab in your bios and press enter on “Exit Saving Changes”. As the PC reboots, it should ask you to Press any key to boot from CD… go ahead and press the space bar to start the installer.
• If you do not want to use Windows 7 again the you can remove the extra partitions on your Hard drive, otherwise leave them be. Either way, you will not need them for Windows XP. I suggest creating a 10 GB partition that will be used for storing your drivers and misc software needed for reinstalling your OS. If you so choose to make an image/restore point for your newly installed OS you should also save it to this 6GB partition. Follow the Windows XP installer as usual. The next steps will take place after you have booted into your New Windows XP installation.
• Pop in that CD you burned at the beginning of this tutorial and copy all the files over to your desktop, then install each one. I tried to include all the drivers in this one release, I am not aware if I missed any. There are different variations of the same drivers too - You will have to check to see which ones you should use.
• Last but not least, after you install all your drivers and get it up to date with Windows updates, Anti-virus installed, your favorite programs installed, etc I suggest making an image of your OS. When your computer gives you trouble in the future you can restore from this point instead of jumping through all these hoops again.
• I personally have installed Windows XP on my new Acer Aspire 5517-5671 and have so far not found any issues with the XP OS on this PC.

I hope that someone out there who is as frustrated as I have been so far will find some comfort or relief from this.

Thoughts, comments, testimonials, successful/failed installations, other bug fixes related to this are welcome!

In case you missed the download link above for the torrent file for these drivers, you can download them from TheGhostBay: Download Windows XP Acer 5517-5671 Drivers Torrent

Last night I went out and bought myself my first laptop computer! Being the computer user that I am, I LOVE the ability to take my PC with me.

Aces Aspire 5517 5671

• Windows 7 Home Premium
• 1.60 Ghz Processor
• 256 MB Video Card
• 15 inch screen
• CD/DVD burner
• Card Reader
• 64 bit processor (32 subset)
• 16:9 screen res / ratio

My most recent post was that of “Windows 7 is not that bad…” but after my experience with it last night, I feel betrayed at the lack of talent and brain power behind Windows 7. I will explain a few key things that will help you make a good decision if you plan on buying a laptop in the near future with Windows 7 on it.

Let me start by saying, this is not just me ripping on Microsoft, this is me getting pumped over the lack of common sense that seams to be smothering our people these days.

Microsoft needs to stop making a “home” and “pro” variations of their OS’. Now days, all it does is piss people off when they switch from Pro to Home because home is missing a few important things. Windows 7 has a lot of great new features and more security, blah blah blah… but it is missing a LOT of functionality that we are used to having.

I just went out and bought a new WRT54G Linksys wireless router for my home network. I find that running a wireless network is just too much of a security risk unless you go the FULL extent of securing your network, including but not limited to MAC address filtering, WPA2 Personal Security (TKIP+AES), and a long password. Even then people can sniff wireless packets to retrieve passwords to internet accounts or your wireless network and can clone your mac address to match their own. So you can see that if you live in an area where a lot of people are in range of your Access Point, you can be hacked and you would never even know it. I brought home my new baby and first things first, I wanted to connect to my wireless network. But as Microsoft would have it, Windows 7 can NOT CONNECT to WPA2 Personal protected networks (even though it has the settings for it) and at that, it can only choose AES or TKIP, but not both. If I am not mistaken, have linksys routers with WPA2P+TKIP+AES not been around for many years? Why does Windows 7 lack this common connectivity issue?

After further attempts, I changed my network to use WEP encryption, and then even tried a MAC filter only - It seams Windows 7 took a crap because I couldn’t get it to work at all last night. Is it a possible issue with the Linksys WRT54G router? Who knows.

Windows 7 controls it’s users, not the other way around as it should be:

If you want to move your files around in My computer… I’m sorry, in “Computer”… it won’t let you. You are forced to have auto arrange left on permanently. If you try to connect to a wireless network and it fails, Windows 7 doesn’t even give you a reason why it failed. It just says that it was not able to connect. If you dive deeper and do the diagnoses it tells you, “There is trouble with the wireless card or the Wireless Access Point”…NO SHIT! You think that most people would know that by this point already. Instead of having one page with all the options for related system tasks such as setting your screen resolution, your font size, screen saver, background/desktop settings, etc they have these options spread over a handful of pages. WHY!? It was better, fast, quicker and easier with the way you had it in XP. 7 tries WAY TOO HARD to be like a Mac. The thing is, I use windows because it’s NOT a Mac!! That’s the whole damn point!

So I spoke with the people at Frys, where I bought the laptop, and they stated that installing a different OS voids the warranty. I called Microsoft and they don’t even have customer service / support unless you pay extra for it. So I was left hanging without so much as an explanation from Microsoft as to why I was having so much trouble. I called the manufacturer and the Jihad-ist on the other end told me that they are hardware only, no support for the OS at all was available, but they suggested that I register with them and get a new Wireless Access Point.

So enough is enough.

Forget this BS. Forget MS, Forget about ACER……..

I am installing WHAT I WANT on MY new computer!

Read my next post for a tutorial on what you need to do to install Windows XP (or Linux) on your new ACER 5517 Laptop.

Please comment below your hate or love for the new Windows 7.