Installing Windows XP on Wal-Mart Pre-Black Friday Laptops
By Troy on Apr 20, 2008 in Misc
Background
I was in the market for a new laptop when Wal-Mart announced their pre-Black Friday “super” special on an Acer 5315 laptop at a mere price of $350. I previously purchased a Compaq laptop back in 1999 that served me well, but by now was quite antiquated. The Acer 5315 specs looked promising except for one teensy weensy detail that I was sure I could overlook – Windows Vista.
Over the past several months I haven’t used the laptop as much as I thought I would, and I attribute much of that to the installation of Vista. Even after installing the maximum 2 gigs of memory, the machine was slow to boot up, slow to play Starcraft (although now I think I know why…), and slow to do almost anything. Even running a copy of Castblaster (a podcasting program) was painful. An experience trying to run a video editing program on it last week was the last straw, it was time to “upgrade” it to Windiows XP.
The Problem
In doing a Google search for installing Windows XP on the laptop, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be easy. It would seem that Acer had zero Windows XP drivers for the laptops, and the settings for booting up were confusing for those who were not familiar with installing Windows XP.
Now I had reinstalled Windows about a billion times over the years, but even for me the instructions seemed daunting. That is until I found a web site that offered step by step instructions for installing Windows XP on the Acer 5315. Here.
The Process
I followed the instructions carefully, but when I rebooted for the final time I was greeted with a wonderful blue screen of death. I then remembered something about the boot drive type that I read on a separate web site (which was not explained on the instructions I linked to above) that said I needed to change the type of the boot drive from SATA to IDE in the bios. Once I did that. Voila! Windows XP!
I went through the rest of the install, chose my initial username, and happily reinstalled Castblaster and the trial version of Goldwave… the important programs. I rebooted to make sure the installation really was successful and it auto-logged into my main account. I didn’t like that – I wanted the username/password screen, so I went into the control panel, changed the startup sequence to show the login screen and shut down the computer while I had lunch.
I Can’t Log In
A couple of hours later I decide I want to reinstall some more productivity software so I turn on the laptop, get to the login screen, type in my password and … I can’t log in. What the heck? I try the password over and over, which I set during installation, but nothing happens. Finally, I search on my other computer for ways to recover a lost password and give it a try. It doesn’t work and instead installs another copy of Windows on the computer. Not what I wanted.
Just as the computer is booting up after installing the second copy of the operating system, it hit me. I was stupid.
The Final Solution
What I did was so stupid, I hesitated to blog about it. When I set the startup sequence to ask for a username/password… I never actually set a password for the user account I was using. That is why I couldn’t log in. I then remembered what the password I did set was for – the Administrator user. So as soon as the Windows login screen appeared for installation #2, I rebooted and chose installation #1, logged in with the Administrator account, set the password for my main user account, logged off, logged back in with my user account and ta-da! Im back in business. And of course I promptly removed installation #2 from the boot menu, and deleted it from the computer.
Frustrating, yes. But after using it for half the weekend … oh so worth it.
Technorati Tags: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Acer 5315, Troy Rutter
So you were trying to use Castblaster? I almost thought that RR #66 was on the way!!!
Hope all is well.
Matt
I held off going to Vista for quite awhile because of all the negative feedback, but now that I do have it I love it.
What is it that turns you off from Vista?
Another question, does Acer actually have decent computers? My very first computer was an Acer. It was such a piece of crap that I swore never again.
I didn’t mind the look of Vista, it was the performance. I had purchased the Acer since it was pretty much the same computer processing power as I had in my Dell desktop from 2004. I then upgraded the laptop to 2 gigs, which should habe been VERY comparable.
But the thing took forever to start up, and then when I tried to run Castblaster (an audio ap) the processor couldn’t keep up and choked on the audio. And then I tried a game which should run ultra-smooth since it was so old (Starcraft) and it was one of the slowest at the LAN party behind machines with only 512 ram!
Now that I have downgraded, it seems much more fast and stable and I have used it more in the past week than I have from November – beginning of April.
Acer isn’t the BEST computer you can get on the block, it is kind of like an upgrade to eMachine’s. It’s good for me since it was the $350 special, and I didn’t want t spend a small fortune for a top-of-the-line laptop that I just want to do some audio and writing on.
If I could, I would definitely get something a little better (maybe an integrated webcam , more HD space, DVD burner) but for $350 it really isn’t too bad.
My new PC has Vista, and I’m pretty unimpressed. The damned UAC box irritates the heck out of me, and it has a nasty habit of slowing down to a crawl and then speeding up again. Add to that the incompatibility with some of my old hardware, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
I have a second Dell machine with XP running, just in case I need to do anything complicated. ::LOL::
I also bought an Acer 5315, preloaded with Vista, Dec 07.
I doubled RAM to max and even then Windows Explorer took 4 minutes to arrive (and that was without any applications installed, just raw Vista.) Then gave to a guru to load XP Home, he had some trials with it. No WiFi to start with but another guru fixed that with a driver from Acer-europe.
What bugged me about the Acer was that bloating “Acer Power Programming???” and Vista’s bells+whistles. Now my beast is due for a reload of XP and I do not have the technical know how so many of you have. I think I’ll just slash my wrists and bleed into the keyboard, maybe blood will help!!