CYBEREVOLUTION

I have finally solved the problem of getting Windows Vista downgraded to XP on my…modest Acer Aspire 5310!!! Yeeeeeee-Har! Thanks to the AWESOME power of nLite and some pretty good instructions from here Wiki-me-silly!! Although the instructions were focused at creating a build of ‘lite’ XP for EEE devices, it was straight forward enough to alter it to my needs…

My problem started with the fact I have an 80Gig SATA drive connected via AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), and the helpful Acer dudes have disabled my ability in the BIOS to revert back to IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics). So when you put in the bog standard XP disc, all’s well until you come to select the installation destination…oops no disc! Ah but of course all you need do is hit F6 and install the SATA drive right? WRONG! These wonderful Acer Laptops have no Floppy drive, and you don’t get the option to select any alternative.

Insert months of whining and swearing at Acer behind their backs, and then I come across this post on a forum >> Forum_Post And lo….it’s as if the light of the heavens have open themselves to me!

Anyhoo…I was able to slipstream the correct driver for my drive into the installation of XP, rip out all the rubbish apps i don’t want, intigrate SP2, add a few cool extras like Notepad++ and Winrar (file compression) and FileZilla (cool FTP app), Avast Home (Free Anti-Virus), XnView (image viewing and conversion) and creating a insert and forget ISO disc, so that I just have to switch the laptop on, put the disk in and forget it exists for 40 mins…

I know many geeks out there will holler…nLite is nothing new, but it was easy to follow, clear and intuitive and worth a great big HUGE thumbs up from me so there!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 12:12 am and is filed under General.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.