Hi, new here.
I have an Aspire 3680 that came installed with Vista. I emailed Acer regarding down grading to XP and got this reply:
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Hi Tim,
Microsoft may be able to downgrade vista to XP, their contact is 13 20 58.
As for drivers, we only support the Operating System that is provided with the unit ie Vista. Any drivers provided on the website for other operating systems (XP) that we use on other systems are there as a courtesy. We do not use Linux and do not have any drivers for it.
To possibly find drivers the website www.driverguide.com may be a good place to start.
Also we do not have an instruction page for formatting and installing XP as we do not support removing our operating system and installing another under warranty.
Help on this would be found at support.microsoft.com
Best Regards,
Daniel Hatfield
First Level Support
Address: Unit 7/8 145 Arthur St Flemington NSW 2140
Contact: 1300 365 100
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I was very disappointed by this response. Especially since, when I ran CPU Usage monitor (ctrl+alt+delete, performance) the system ran at 17% – 35% when nothing was running. It choked if I tried to play music through Vista’s media player and changed the margins in a 50pg word document at the same time.
If you supply a computer with an operating system that is too resource hungry for the system you have failed your customers and owe them assistance in making the best of it.
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Solutions
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I then installed Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) and it worked a dream. Very fast and slick. I installed it as a dual boot system so that I could run either Vista, or Ubuntu. Ended up only using Ubuntu.
I then decided that Vista was a waste of space so formatted my HD partitions that contained Vista and the Back-up Ghost. (I did create a recovery CD first.)
I then installed XP.
This worked OK, but I did not have any of the utilities that came with the acer like power management, audio, internet, video settings etc. But it was running.
I then downloaded all the XP files from this address: (from another computer)
http://global.acer.com/support/download.htm (then I selected Asia Pacific to get to):
[URL=”http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal20.cfm?website=AcerPanAm.com/au&siteid=8116&areaid=12&formid=3394#results”]http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal20.cfm?website=AcerPanAm.com/au&siteid=8116&areaid=12&formid=3394#results
[/URL]
I then went through and installed them all by copying them onto the ACER hard drive and then going into the unzipped folders and clicking on Setup or Install or whatever looked best.
Some worked and some failed.
I had to download the .net framework 1.1 from:
[URL=”http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en”]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en
[/URL]
and then put that on my Acer and run it.
I then had to run the one in:
AS3680_eFrame.zip
before I could run the other drivers for Empowering Technology, so probably best to run this first.
I did get my audio driver, power management, ePerformance, eSettings and a few other things going.
I still have no internet connection.
I still have no graphics card driver and am stuck in 600 x 800
If I go into Control Panel / System / Hardware / Device Manager
my “Other Devices” is all big yellow question marks and not working.
If I click on the eNet Management icon that is part of the acer empowering technology I get an error and it bombs out. Not sure why, because the installation of the eNet driver appears to run fine.
I am hoping that if I get the eNet working, then when my computer searches the net for other drives, it will sort the rest out.
Please, if anyone has got further than this with downgrading to XP, please let me know how you did it.
Tim
