Hardware

Acer ships its Espire E571 with a version of the Marvell Youkon network card driver that does not actually work on Vista. Version V9.11.11.3 does give you connectivity, until you attempt to copy larger files. What is confusing though is that the network driver is the last thing that you would look at. Get the latest version from http://www.marvell.com/drivers/search.do for your version of vista. Version 10.15.7.3 works.

I had to learn this the hard way, when I had trouble accessing my Western Digital NetCenter drive. I have read many confusing blog entries which try to indicate that the Western Digital NetCenter drive is not compatible with Vista. This proves to be entirely incorrect. It is compatible. I have a high spec Acer notebook running Vista which has never had any problems accessing the WD Netcenter driver. None of the Vista security fixes described elsewhere are required to make it work. I eventually figured out that the problem was the network card after I copied my entire disk off to another XP based machine. I tried to copy my test file from the Acer Espire Vista machine to my new XP share and found it was also struggling to copy.

The symptom that you see is that Vista stops to ?think? about how long it needs to take to copy the file. Given that the file in question was 6 Meg this should normally not be visible at all. This either stays for 30 seconds and Vista gives up and asks if you want to cancel or it starts to copy at a snails pace and eventually fails.

It took me a week to resolve. I hope this will help you out there if you are tearing your hair out after having purchased an otherwise very good machine.

Regards
Peter Scheffel