I haven’t had the money to buy a decent soldering iron and try to repair the sick motherboard on our Acer Aspire 5920, but I started messing around with it a bit anyway. It’s not perfect, but it’s usable – we can operate it from battery which gets us about two to two and a half hours’ of use before it’s dead.
The moment you plug it in, it will power off and refuse to come back on.
So, the Vista installation had some malware issues, and it’s loaded down with all the garbage Acer crams on their OEM machines… and my desktop won’t run Windows 7 because my graphics card is too crap… so I decided to try Windows 7 on the laptop.
It runs fantastic – ~15 second boot times aren’t outside the norm, apps start up immensely quickly. So far all of the hardware seems perfectly well supported, apart from the touchpad – it functions, but things like the “drag the edge of the pad to scroll”, and the scroller function of the middle mouse button don’t work. I’ll try to find another driver later on and see if I can make it behave properly, because I didn’t realize how much I actually used that stuff.
The graphics card was supported moderately well with the generic driver, and the wireless and wired network devices both were supported which made updating drivers for everything else a breeze.
It’s easy to say that anything looks good after Vista, but I think I can honestly say I like Windows 7 more than I like Windows XP.
Update: I found a driver for the Synaptics TouchPad that’s compatible with Windows 7, which doesn’t support the scroll button or the “tilt”, but the “drag edge of pad to scroll” function does work. Awesome.
