Troubleshooting

This post is only for those who own an Acer 4310. So, shoo shoo.

Okay, just to set things straight, I am not an expert nor am I pretending to be one. I am simply an owner who's done a bit of searching on the net and wanting to share some (probably) useful info.

Before I migrated to Windows Vista, I've had my share of glitches with my notebook, largely owing to the fact that I am such a sucker for fresh releases of customized Windows OS from the nearest IT shop here in Bangkok. So sue me.

Anyways, here's what I found out that may be useful to other Acer Aspire 4310 users.

The Acer Aspire 4310, said an Acer technician to me, is designed for Windows Vista. The Acer CD drivers pack that came with the notebook are all for Vista so that confirms it. But of course, like other PC's, it can run on XP as well. That said, the first thing you need to decide for yourself is whether or not you would like give Vista a try, or if you would hang on to good almighty XP.

If you go with XP, that means you're one of the substantial number of people who are comfortable with the reliability that XP offers you wouldn't think of touching Vista. Initially I did try XP Pro SP2 on my notebook and it ran perfectly well. (But eventually I switched to Vista because of those delicious GUI and Aero effects.)

Now since the hardware in the 4310 are Vista-ready, you're going to need some additional drivers for some stuff to work in XP, like Bluetooth, volume dial, Wi-fi and etc.

The good thing is all these drivers are available in the Acer website. Check out the Euro site here and all the goodies offered:

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_4310.html

Remember to load only the XP drivers and to install the Intel Chipset first, and then all the rest.

Now chances are, you will come across some problems with the camera. The Acer technician told me I should use the Suyin cam driver. It did work, but I found out on the other hand that the Acer CrystalEye camera shortcut link under the Programs list no longer worked. What happened was the 1.3 megapixel camera built into the system had shown up as a "USB drive" in My Computer instead, which isn't really a problem. Look for it, it's there. So instead of using the broken CrystalEye camera link, you just can just go to your My Computer folder, click on the videocam icon and snap away.

Now how about if you would like to use Vista? First of all, the original 512MB RAM is intended to work on the Home edition of Vista, but if you want your notebook to run faster (or if you want to install a higher version of Vista like Premium or Ultimate), you just gotta upgrade your RAM.

Upgrading the RAM however doesn't mean you're turning your system into a heavy-duty Deus Ex Machina. Your notebook, after all, is still running on Intel Celeron with a shared graphics memory. A top of the line 40K Baht PC would usually have dual (or quad!) core processor and a dedicated graphics memory. The Aspire 4310 is single core and uses shared memory of 224 MB. But for me that works just fine. It's all a story of preference and user requirements anyways.

Once you do a clean install (clean is always better than the Upgrade option), you will notice that Vista would automatically install the required drivers including all updates necessary for your in-built hardware to work. If you find something's still amiss, like if the Wi-Fi network adapter wouldn't work, you can simply download the necessary Vista drivers from the above Acer Euro website. It's really that simple with Vista.

Additionally, I found out that I don't have to separately install the Suyin camera driver. But I did notice that unlike Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger couldn't detect the notebook's camera, initially. Fortunately, Acer offers a solution: simply install the Bison camera driver. I did and problem was solved.

I'm not sure if installing the Bison camera driver will sort out the same Yahoo Messenger glitch within XP because I never tried it, but why don't you go ahead and test drive? You can always uninstall the driver if you run into any problem.

Also, if you find that there's a problem with the Bluetooth driver that Vista automatically installed in your notebook, simply load the driver from Acer website instead.

So there you go. That's about all I know about my notebook. I've installed all the Vista updates and hotfixes from the Microsoft website, just to be safe. Previously I installed the Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh (Beta) update, but I was getting some problems with Internet Explorer- sometimes the browser fails and self-closes- so I decided to uninstall it to rectify this glitch and it did, though not a hundred percent. Vista is far from perfect but heck, it sure is pretty. I also switched to Firefox, which is more stable than Internet Explorer, and I also opted not to install the Acer Empowering tools- I don't need these. I had them running while I was on XP but I never used them.

And just for added info, what's my notebook's Windows Experience Index rating, you might ask. Well, my lowest subscore is a humble 2.6, owing to the shared graphics memory. It's just a 17K-Baht notebook in case you have forgotten. But the rest of the subscores are quite okay:

Decent, I should say. Microsoft does say in its website:

Office productivity. If you use your computer almost exclusively for office productivity, such as word processing, spreadsheets, e mail, and web browsing, then high subscores in the CPU and memory categories are important. Subscores of 2.0 or higher are usually sufficient for the hard disk, desktop graphics, and 3D graphics categories.

Gaming and graphic-intensive programs. If you use your computer for games or programs that are graphic-intensive, such as digital video editing applications or realistic first-person games, then high subscores in the RAM, desktop graphics, and 3D gaming graphics categories are important. Subscores of 3.0 or higher are usually sufficient in the CPU and hard disk categories.

The Aspire 4310 starts up pretty quick (the computer info splash screen appears after a minute and a half, upon which I can start running applications- and that's with Spybot and AVG auto-starting), and shuts down in about 20 seconds. That's decently fast for Vista, don't you think?

Okay then, enough about this notebook.

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