Major laptop problem
 

I have an Acer Aspire 5680 laptop, which was on FAT 32.

Last night I converted it to NTFS, which worked ok.

But now it boots and freezes shortly after boot up, if you move the mouse over the time the hour glasss symbol appears and the start button doesn't work, even CTRL, ALT & DEL does SFA.

Can I find the recovery disks that I made so I can try a possible repair? no.

Is there anything I can do?

I can get into bios and get it to boot from a CD/USB etc.

Would the Acer site be worth looking through?

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Depends what your priority is and what you want to do - is there data on there you need to get off, or do you just want to reinstall windows and wipe the thing?

It's easy enough to get Vista/Win7 onto a USB drive if you have another computer handy (which I assume you do, since you're posting on here), XP not so easy as the discs are a lot more specific.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

you should be able to get into recovery without discs

Re: Major laptop problem
 

look here
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...t/nostart.mspx

and here

http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/xphome.html

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Yes, you press Alt+F10 at the 'Acer' boot screen ...that is unless they've deleted the recovery partition to reclaim disk space, or (as it's a 4 year old laptop model) upgraded to Vista/Windows 7 which would have merged the 'hidden' partitions into the primary one.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

I tried the boot from last known working but still no luck, and I cannot use the XP repair disc as there isn't one.

I found the discs I created when I first bought the lappy, but it will only wipe and start again so I am copying what I can to an external drive.

---------- Post added at 14:04 ---------- Previous post was at 14:02 ----------

Will try this when I've finished copying data, I have the Vista P:remium upgrade which came free but never installed it.

If I have to restart should I upgrade to vista?

---------- Post added at 14:18 ---------- Previous post was at 14:04 ----------

Alt F10 had no repair option so I'm doing a factory reset.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

in my experience the recovery partitions are left cuz they are not hidden when you run installation

Re: Major laptop problem
 

I'm back up and running, just uninstalling all the crap that came with it, Norton, AOL etc.

Should I upgrade to Vista Premium or leave it at XP MCE?

Re: Major laptop problem
 

leave it

Re: Major laptop problem
 

I'd suggest upgrading it to Windows 7 if you have that option, Vista is (in most people's opinions) a steaming pile of you know what

Re: Major laptop problem
 

4 hours in and not scratched the surface of what I need to find and reinstall :(

---------- Post added at 18:38 ---------- Previous post was at 18:33 ----------

I've just noticed that the factory reset and put the c drive back to FAT32, I wonder if the convert to NTFS went wrong?

Re: Major laptop problem
 

The factory reset normally reformats the drive as part of the process, hence will have reformatted it as FAT32 regardless of what it was before.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Out of the box my Acer Aspire (can't remember model) had a bad/unreadable cluster on it's HDD.

Prior to discovering this, I couldn't get ESET to complete a scan although other AV's had no problem plus among other issues Acronis mostly (but not always) failed to make a image.

Trying to research the issue I came across a mammoth thread at Wilder's about the same issue that had been running for ages without ESET support solving it. As the majority of complaints were about Acers, I now wonder if, somehow or the other, a batch of Acer machines were/are? suffering from the same issue.

Just wondering if you should run chkdsk before trying to convert to NTFS again?

Hmmm...Just remembered my attempt to upgrade from vista to 7 failed big time. Maybe my bad cluster had a hand in that? I guess I should try the upgrade (or maybe just reinstall) again sometime now it's fixed.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

6 hours in and I'm getting tired of XP updates 137 so far.

Close to calling it a night, and having a very large vodka.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

When you make the recovery discs with Acer the original is deleted automatically to make more space.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Ok I feel I need to spout some of my old rhetoric a lot would most likely have heard it before

Vista was only crap in the hands of the under rammed and the impatient. I ram vista 64 bit ultimate without issue for a long time.

The need for a brief history of home operating systems is required ( from win 95)

win 95 was a giant leap massively user friendly compared to 3.1
windows 98 a small advancement but added better USB support among other things win98 second ed more stable

Win ME more of an interim release prior to xp

Now XP when released was plagued with poor driver support everyone hated it slagged it off and said it was a steaming pile of poop. However XP had something Vista didnt have. Time to mature... no other home operating system has had the amount of time XP has so it was well supported and had its 3 service packs. It was and is a stable OS

Vista was released and was plagued with the same poor driver support as XP and had quite an innovative caching system of ram. Unfortunately many systems were shipped without enough ram to allow it all to run smoothly. It had not any where near the time XP had to mature.

Windows 7 released. M$ learnt from a lot of Vista flaws the caching has gone and its a lot smoother. Bare in mind Windows 7 is built on a similar kernal as Vista and a lot of Vista drivers work on Windows 7 meaning driver support was pretty much a shoe in from the start.

Vista was no more a steaming pile of poo in its short life than XP was in its early years.....

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Not heard it from you but heard it from a lot of people. Vista remains a steaming pile of you know what in a most people's opinions. Never said mine though, I used it happily for many years too, both on my desktop and laptop.

I know very well about the early days of XP and the requirements and reputation it had back then, I was an early adopter of XP as well. That said, having 3 sevice packs isn't particualrly notable. The two immediate predecessors to XP in it's line (NT5 and NT4) had 4 and 6 service packs respectively. XP however, was a minor revision of a major version, in the same way that Windows 7 was to Vista. Driver support was actually quite widespread, as most Windows 2000 drivers were compatible. People mainly slagged it off due to gaming support (loss of DOS, NT architecture) and increased hardware requirements. It did however succeed in the end as the user experience was good, and the platform was stable once hardware caught up.

Vista had a lot of underlying enhancements in the kernel, and was a technically good operating system. However most people do not measure how good their operating system is based on the efficiency of new kernel code. For them, what matters is how the system responds and behaves in day to day use on their average consumer laptop, and in that respect Vista's user experience failed, badly. Even on high end hardware it had a considerable number of bugs and bad behaviours some of which remain to this day. XP and 7 on the other hand, run a lot more efficiently on the same hardware. Some of us build our own machines and custom install 64-bit copies of Vista and plonk in a ton of RAM; great. The average consumer has neither the option or desire for that stuff, they buy what is provided for them in a shop and that was inevitably underpowered laptops with 32-bit OS' limiting upgrade possibilities without full reinstallations which were beyond the capabilites of your typical home user. That said, the ability of Win 7 to do more on lesser hardware pretty much proves Vista was terribly inefficient.

Oh as for the caching system, Vista's caching system was just a bad "improvement" of the same found in XP, it's neither new or innovative. It's still there in Windows 7 as well, it's certainly not been removed. It just works a lot better because, well, Vista sucked.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

make your mind up at the start you said you used it happily and then at the end you say it sucked ;)


BTW I over simplified my response due to the fact it looked like you were going along with the sheep lol

God you took ages to post and then edited it after I had finished lol

Re: Major laptop problem
 

I can use things that suck happily. I used it because it was far better (and faster on my hardware) than XP, doesn't mean it was any good in the absolute sense, just better than the alternative. It did actually improve my laptop's battery life by 2 hours over XP though!

Same reason I'm happily using my 50mb Virgin cable connection. I only get ~20-30mb on busy days and hence it sucks, but I'm happy enough since it's still twice what I'd get on DSL. If there was a better alternative, I'd take it but there isn't.

Oh, and I bought Windows 7 almost as soon as it came out, even though I had access to it for free, it was that good. :p:

---------- Post added at 00:23 ---------- Previous post was at 00:20 ----------

I'm like that, make a post then spend the next 45 minutes editing it over and over

Re: Major laptop problem
 

you mention they buy what is available in the shops. That is correct and that highlights the worst part of the PC industry. OEMs like Dell PC world and others should configure machines to work properly

It is not M$hqs fault that a system could ship running Vista basic and only have 512 meg of ram is it? its the fault of the OEM

The system builder as you say should configure his machine correctly for the software he/she is going to run and doing that with Vista I found easy. I sold many machine with Vista and all my customers have been happy so none of them will agree with the sheep

Re: Major laptop problem
 

That's certainly true to some extent, however Microsoft isn't completely innocent in this matter either - just google "Vista capable class action lawsuit" for example. Mind you that was a combination of Microsoft screwing around and system builders sucking up and letting them.

With the right hardware, which clearly both of us had, Vista can run like a champ. However Windows 7 demonstrated that had MS put their mind to it, they could have made it run pretty well on lesser hardware too. Mind you, SP1 and SP2 did also improve things a great deal, far more than Windows 7 SP1 does anyway.

Re: Major laptop problem
 

but Vista was superceded by windows 7 after a short time which is my point XP had years to mature and develope.

Think we missed out with the lack of WinFS which has just vanished

Re: Major laptop problem
 

Well indeed, Vista was replaced quickly. Some people say Windows 7 should really have been Vista SP2 (before Vista SP2 actually came out), and in reality a lot of the bigger changes in Win 7 have been in the user interface and experience rather than the underlying kernel and system architecture. Given enough time a lot of the improvements in 7 could have been tweaked into Vista, but I guess we'll never know. At the end of the day though, given a decision between putting Vista and 7 or XP on a machine today, there's no real reason to go Vista at all.

Oh, yes, I was actually looking forward to WinFS :(

Re: Major laptop problem
 

I used to have a HP/Compaq Presario with Vista home premium installed by OEM. It ran like a bag of... what comes out of the rear end of a any animal. First thing I did was upped the memory from 512MB to 4GB, and noticed an immediate improvement.

Then I followed a few guides about how to strip out all the OEM installed rubbish, turn off unneeded services, and optimize it. I then lived with it for a good 2 years, quite happily.

Then I built my own PC, based on a core i7, with 8GB ram, and Windows 7 Ultimate (64 bit).

Know what? I don't notice any improvements over my old vista in day to day running. Its only when I start gaming, or re-encoding videos that I notice differences.

Vista was NOT the pile of steaming poo people make out, it was usually just badly configured by the OEM's