ILuvJohn

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.

I have talked in the past about how much I hate Microsoft and their over controlling attempt on keeping users within the lines of “proper” computer use…But as uncontrollable circumstances have it,  I got a copy of Windows 7 on my work computer about a month or 2 ago. Though Vista should have been the death of Microsoft, I am finding Windows 7 to be quite a more pleasant experience, though it still has a handful of little things that piss me off when I use it.

What needs to change in order to make the Ultimate Windows Operating System:

• Internet Explorer needs to be completely SEPARATE from the rest of the Operating System. It is not a good idea to integrate any part of the Windows OS with the programs that come with the OS by default. I, as well as many others, completely block the Internet Explorer program because it is vulnerable to viruses, Trojans, and other forms of internet based attacks and exploits. Most common, are pop-ups that use Internet Explorer to display on the users system.
• With the exception of the Desktop, you can not manually move files in folders. That’s right - you can not organize files except by a bunch of predefined selections. This is a BIG issue for some people. Many people go to select large amounts of files but find a few that they do not want so they just move those files out of the way. Sure you could hold CTRL and click on the files to deselect them, but it’s still annoying you can not just move them out of the way. Microsoft, you need to stop trying to CONTROL users, and let them do what they way. Let’s say a user can move their files off of the visible screen or something….that’s ok because it gives computer Gurus like myself the opportunity to make a few $$ here and there giving others a hand. It also makes it let frustrating for the expert computer users to get done what they need done.
• Get rid of the control panel the way it is and use the classic control panel from 2000 / XP. The classic control panel was perfect and should not have been moved or changed. Also, all the programs in the Control panel have been changed to look different….they look like shit now. We want to the regular grey ugly boxes back because they were easy to read and work with. Now there is so much crap in these programs that unless you are used to it already, it is hard to figure out the first time you go in there. Basically you are turning off existing Windows users from using the new Windows Operating systems. We want something familiar to work with, that is less buggy than previous versions…..that’s all.
• The start bar is that of Vista. Windows XP / 2000’s start bar is much better. The start bar for Vista is stupid and hard to clearly read and understand it.

Though Windows 7 has a lot of things that irritate me, there are a few new things that I really enjoy.

• The Calendar is similar to that of Windows vista. I like it. Make it sound off alarms, or send emails when scheduled events take place, etc and we would be set. Just make sure it works with any email provider and not just hotmail / live, etc.
• Support for multiple monitors is excellent! Being able to drag and drop open program windows from full screen to small screen and vica versa is awesome and should not be altered for future versions now that it is part of the Windows OS.
• Although the start bar from Windows 7 sucks, you can download a program to change the start bar back to the classic version. I use the program called CSMenu in conjunction with a program to hide the original start menu. Download the latest CSMenu and Start Killer from their websites.
• Clicking on the shutdown button in the start bar shuts the PC down immediately….it does not ask you any extra questions. Perfect! I never use the log off function anyways.
• FTP locations show up as shortcuts in My Computer. This is excellent because you can browse your files on the internet as if they were right here on your local computer. I find this to be extremely handy! They should work to make this feature faster and even assign the location a drive letter so local programs can read / write to these FTP locations without any issues.
• Windows 7 actually seams to run faster than Windows XP does on a fresh install. Can’t argue with that!
  
• No More Defrag! Kiss it goodbye. Thank God!

That’s it for now. I’ll write more about Windows 7 as I become more and more familiar with it.

Comments and corrections are welcome. A link back to this page from your own website would be awesome as well!