1.5 years ago, when I lived in Spain, I had the bad judgement to buy an expensive shitty Acer Aspire 8730G laptop with a spanish Windows Vista pre-installed. Not knowing a word of spanish and changing from XP to Windows Vista at the same time was a cluster fuck. The worst things with Windows vista is the constant allow prompts that keep popping out as soon as you want to do something. The system messages and error messages also suck ass because you can’t copy a fucking letter from them and google for resolution. You must eye-copy everything that gets thrown in your face. Especially frustrating when it’s all in spanish.
Anyhow, I slowly started to cope with Vista and picked up the essentials in spanish: Instalar, desinstalar, bloquar, desbloquar, apagar, reiniciar and so on. There was one problem though, or actually a few problems. When playing music in any player and surfing at the same time, the sound would occassionally crackle. Obviously a driver issue. I googled and found others with similar problems who apparantly solved them by disabling their wireless network card. Well it did not do anything for me. In addition, I tried all drivers I could find for both the wireless card and my Realtek High Definition Audio soundcard. I even went through the hell of updating my NVidia Geforce 9600 GT driver to Nvidias reference driver, which by no means is straight forward on a spanish vista, and that did not do shit either. The sound still crackled. Furthermore, I had another problem which persisted. The top of the screen would flicker when watching movie scenes where the camera was panning. Nothing I could do about it – Acer Aspire 8730G was and still is a shitty laptop that no drivers can fix.
Anyway, I ordered a cheap Windows 7 upgrade back then and let it lie for fear of using it and having to install all programs from scratch again. Then came present time and a gift from a former business associate of mine. We happen to share a great deal of hosting accounts and about 2 weeks ago it was brought to our attention that evil files were being uploaded to the ftp accounts we were using. As it turned out, my business associate had gotten his Flashfxp compromised, in fact, it no longer worked at all, and most data within had been leaked. Before that became apparant, I ran both AVG and Kaspersky Internet Security on my computer and though they did find a few things, they found nothing that could have done it. Kaspersky is a weird software btw. If you have scene releases in rar format on your harddisk the program simply keeps scanning them forever. I left it on over night and it was not done after 18 fucking hours. Kaspersky can’t cope with rar files, especially not scene rar files.
After that I ran the Windows 7 upgrade which involved 2 different cds. One with Acer bullshit on it and one with Windows on it. The full installation involved three retarded steps: 1 – Acer Cd; 2 – Windows cd; 3 – Back to Acer CD. The installation program did not let me format c, however, it did let me make a new installation, which I did. In the process, the old windows folder was renamed to windows.old. After the installation was done I had to manually delete the windows.old folder and that was brutal. I could not delete the folder from the root. The deletion process just never finised. I had to venture into the subfolders and delete them one by one. And then delete the windows.old folder in the root. I deleted all installed programs as well, a much bigger folder by any measure, and that only took one command and a few minutes in total. You go figure. Finally I installed the drivers and application data on the Acer cd and that was that.
Of course, my new Windows 7 was in spanish as well and the annoying allow prompts were still there. Likewise, it is still impossible to copy the damn system messages and error messages. I do like the new windows task bar though. Just drag any program down there, right click it and pin it. And the old tool bar can easily be brought back as well. Just right click on the blue bar at bottom of screen, select Tool Bars and then add a new one, name it what you want, create and select a folder to store the data in and that’s it. Just drag down the type of stuff you want to have there. Especially useful for documents in which you store your notes on a daily basis.
First thing I did was to install Winamp and Firefox. And guess what? sound still crackled every now and then. Fucking shit. On top of that I could not turn on the microphone because when it was on, a great deal of noise was on as well. I got some movies running as well and guess what? top of screen still flickered when camera was panning. I updated the sound driver from Acers bullshit to:
Realtek Semiconductor Corp. High Definition Audio System Software Ver: R2.53
This seemed to resolve the microphone issue (and most of the flickering as well?) but the crackling was still there and still is. So much for the Acer Aspire 8730G. G stands for Gofuckyourself.
Lesson is learned though. I am never gonna buy an expensive laptop again. It will be a desktop for games, movies and music in the future, that’s for sure. I mean come on, a laptop with 5.1 sound and 1080p that crackles, flickers and lags regardless of drivers. Even Jesus Christ would be pissed off at that.
Next up is the rundown on software needed for the new Windows installation.
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