Just bought Acer Aspire 5715z

[joshuar]

Well I ordered it late on Monday night from Play.com and it arrived this morning! I am pleased apart from it has Windows Vista on it (UGH!!!).

I am therefore trying to erase the lot and put Windows XP Professional SP2 on it, but the dam thing won't dectect the Hard Drives, any ideas folks?

[Andys]

Mind on some laptops if you uninstall vista you will void the warranty!

[joshuar]

I made a backup disk of the factory settings so I can restore it to Windows Vista and how I bought it if needed.

I just want to get rid of it, found a site which could hopefully do it.

[Janczyk]

Mis-read ;)

:P

What Vista is it?

[Andys]

Well I ordered it late on Monday night from Play.com and it arrived this morning!


Play.com eh?

You'll get it sometime... in the future...

:P
He's already got it...

[joshuar]

I already have it :P it came really quick.

It's Vista Home Premium

[BlueTango]

Surely vista isnt that bad that you feel the need to downgrade?

[darkchicken101]

Acer pre-install loads of ******** on their PCs. Go to add and remove programs (or whatever it is on Vista) and uninstall 'Acer Empowering Technology', and all the other crap that you don't need. The Acer stuff seems to clog up the system quite well.

[Technologic]

What's wrong with vista?

[Recursion]

Uninstall all the OEM crap and it will be fine.

[joshuar]

I always like to do a clean install of a OS cause of all the crap put on by Acer. I have managed to work out that XP can't use SATA or something, but I managed to change it in the BIOS to the older one that XP users (SCSI? I don't know). It's installing properly now.

I just don't like Vista, as it uses up alot of resources and for my needs, doesn't add anything to my overall experience with a computer.

[Recursion]

Oh for peeps sake, stop using that age old crap excuse of it using too many resources, if they are there, why not use them? It frees up resources when they are needed.

[joshuar]

Because I don't need any of it, I just need something that works and works fast, I'd rather use XP over Vista as it's quick and does what I want, it's no hassle to run things. With Vista I get bombed with the UAC asking me if I'm sure at every possible moment and all this fancy UI which I just don't want or need.

It's my personal preference to use XP over Vista because, as I said, Vista adds nothing to my experience with a computer, it just makes it that bit more complicated and slower.

However, I may have to go and use Vista as it's proving to be too much of a pain to get XP working properly.

EDIT: I give up with installing XP, i'll just have to bite my tounge and go with Vista for now :(

[darkchicken101]

Turn off UAC, switch it to Windows Classic.

Then you'll be happy.

[Delatory]

I had to do the same with a laptop before except I had to put dual boot on so it had Vista and XP. the only problem was that If i changed the bios to PATA for the XP installation to detect the harddrive, Vista would stop working.
To overcome this I had to do a process called slipstreaming. You have to find the drivers needed for the hdd in the laptop and use a program called nLite to add the drivers into the installation. You then need to burn the installation to CD. nLite has a bootable Iso part aswell so u make the bootable ISO files then use a program eg. Nero to burn it to CD and it work's perfectly. You can also use the program to add Service Packs and Hotfixes into the installation so when you do reinstall your computer you don't have to spend hours and hours downloading updates from Windows Updates each time.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/resolving-setup-did-not-find-any-hard-disk-drives-during-windows-xp-installation/
That is the full tutorial on how to use nLite and slipstreaming.
Thats the same tutorial I used and managed to get it to work the second time I tried it.

[Jamesy]

for christ sake. If he doesn't want vista he doesn't want it, stop trying to give him useless advice and answer what he actually wants to know.

[joshuar]

He has given up trying to get the drivers working on XP, so he put Vista back on and will have to deal with it.

About slipstreaming, I tried it and it failed :P I had to change the HD type to get it working.

Cheers anyway guys.

[Ryan498]

Urgh! i hate vista, i would rather buy a mac than a oc with vista on it, vista dunt even reconize my 1 year old printer lol :O

[Recursion]

To be honest, I have a laptop with XP on and really want Vista on it lol, If you wanted to and we actually could I would swap LMAO

[Pyroka]

Er... My question is Acer, why? LOL. I'm not bothered about OS', both XP and Vista are pretty good. Get Vista basic if you want Vista as it isn't so much a drastic change from XP to Vista. It's virtually the same framework just with a different interface, and it's proper good.

Or of course, you can try Ubuntu or something different.