Acer One Runs Vista! But Not For Long.

Yes I kid you not. I've been doing some work for a reseller of late and one of the items that I came across was a 4 gb Acer one net book with an install of vista running. The machine had come in from lithuania and as a result had the language set in lithuanian with no option for english in the language panel!! And I do know my way around without being in english.

Anyway I didn't know how they got vista on there so I checked the many forums on the subject and the consensus was that vista will see the intel atom as a duel core chip. The performance was what I'd call plodding. Everything I asked of it took 2-4 seconds and was consistant, from basic things such as opening explorer windows to opening up WMP11 and firefox etc.

Great I thought to myself, lets get XP pro on the thing and we'll be flying along. I had to install the n-lited version Of pro that I keep on a USB key. And install from the key it did very happily.

After that I pointed my browser (on another machine) to acer europe driver downloads and there they all were. So I thought!!

No ethernet driver...oh no :-< Luckily there was a wireless lan driver, so I was in business. I searched for the lan driver online for as long as I could handle that day with no joy. I wondered if the one on a linux disk that came came with the Acer would work but decided to live with the problem for the rest of the evening. I'll just play with this thing online now I'm wireless.

Oh no I won't, nothings happening! I have an excellent signal my tray icon tells me, but nothings happening.

As it turns out I could have re-read a blog by Jake Rayson right here on ZDNet and solved my problem right away! But no I had forgoten all about it and ended up choosing a pain filled path of much online searching. Although I'm a firefox user, one usefull feature of IE is the network diagnostics tool. It told me that I had a radio button switched off. I still didn't click, and I was getting tired, it had already been a long day, so I started looking for radio buttons in all of the network software and properties sections in various explorer windows. No joy.

Back to the forums I thought to my self, then I found my solution. A physical button on the front right hand side of the machine! I give this button a flick and wadya know? it works. I couldn't face hunting around for the ethernet driver so I thought I'd pay a visit to windows update via the firefox windows update add on, for just a small number of updates as I'd already slipstreamed SP3 into the installation folders.

Lo and behold there it was on windows update! my missing ethernet driver. This was a treat from MS I'd only seen before on vista machines. I downloaded it, and it installed right away with no fuss
It just worked.

Next up was the k-lite codec pack to beef up Windows media player 11. No video playback issues ever again once this is on.

Then I put on the very colourful twisted pixel by Brian Spangler, a fairly taxing 3D audio visualiser that plugs in to windows media player and will let you batch process all the mildrop files from the popular winamp media player set up. It all works very well. Music and visuals on my little netbook.

Yes I fell in love with the little thing despite being a detractor in the past. Life eh?


Edit/ havn't been able to get on the windows live skydrive all day today and having recently checked back there is now a whopping....

25GB OF FREE STORAGE!!

That's the most free online storage I've ever seen! and is very handy when your out on the road, yes I'm chuffed.