The Spam Thread!

[huckleberrypie]

Let me know how it goes dude, I hope it's just the adaptor too.

[cpd2009]

Tempting fate here, but so far, it appears the adapter swap did the trick. Before I noticed I had the wrong AC adapter, the Acer kept shutting down during final stages of recovery, and thus Windows wasn't fully restored. It booted and some drivers were installed, but the supporting software was incomplete.

After the adapter swap, I began restoration again, and this time, the Acer was stable as a laptop should be. No random power offs at all. I also tested out running the DVD drive and the external HDD and no shut down either.

I have to wait and see if the adapter swap is truly working, but all appears to be working well. But, because I had to restore the system again, I have to re-download all the Windows Updates. But I need sleep. I been up all night.

Updates shall come later.

[RAMChYLD]

Glad to see it solved. In the meantime, time for bed.

[cpd2009]

While the Acer redownloads the Windows Updates again, I shall share some footnotes about the Acer...

One of the preinstalled bloatware programs is "Acer Arcade Deluxe". It sounds like a program where you buy and manage games, but actually, it's some sort of media center app. It has a DVD/Video player, photo viewer, music player... that sort of thing, all with a fancy full screen interface. They should have named it "Acer Media Deluxe" since Arcade makes people think of games. There is a separate game app though called "GameZone", but it's so outdated I'm not sure if it even works anymore.

Apparently, other Acer 5335 series laptops were capable of Bluetooth. A Bluetooth button is present, but pressing it brings up "No Bluetooth Device". However, the laptop does have a PC Card slot, so perhaps you can get a PC card Bluetooth adapter?


The Windows Experience Index is 3.5. It's not bad for a single core Celeron with 2gb RAM.

[RAMChYLD]

at 3.5, I wouldn't try playing Bioshock on it, lest I want to get Bioshocked (ie smoke and burning smell).

[cpd2009]

at 3.5, I wouldn't try playing Bioshock on it, lest I want to get Bioshocked (ie smoke and burning smell).

The bigger question is... can it run Crysis? </rimshot>

[cpd2009]

Yeah, I made a lame tired joke above.... but anyway...

Restoration is finally complete. Now I just need to do final customization of desktop wallpaper and other things. The Acer already has a name, but I shall reveal that tomorrow... or later today, rather. It's after midnight as I type this.

In the end, I never thought Windows Vista was horrible. I blame PC manufacturers including Vista with laptops meant for XP and hardware manufacturers for rushing out drivers too quickly. Towards the release of Win7, the hardware issues were mostly sorted out and Vista was becoming more like 7 thanks to all the service packs and whatnot.

[huckleberrypie]

That's reassuring, at least you got the sudden restart glitch sorted out.

As for myself, I just breathed a sigh of relief after finding out the cause of a small but still annoying bug which I just noticed recently on the wiki. Configuration seems correct, but for some reason search suggestions refuse to show up after I upgraded Mediawiki to 1.24. As it turns out, the Vector extension which serves as a companion to the skin of the same name has been incorporated into Mediawiki, and thus deprecated as a separate plugin. Disabling it brought back the search suggestions feature.

[cpd2009]

That's reassuring, at least you got the sudden restart glitch sorted out.

As for myself, I just breathed a sigh of relief after finding out the cause of a small but still annoying bug which I just noticed recently on the wiki. Configuration seems correct, but for some reason search suggestions refuse to show up after I upgraded Mediawiki to 1.24. As it turns out, the Vector extension which serves as a companion to the skin of the same name has been incorporated into Mediawiki, and thus deprecated as a separate plugin. Disabling it brought back the search suggestions feature.

I wonder if such features would have been mentioned in the release notes? Usually changes like incorporating a once separate part into the main program is explained in release notes.

For fun, I decided to try YouTube viewing on the Acer, and in the end, it works. HD video even plays, but all of it comes at a cost. There is no hardware accelerated Flash video, so it's best to watch videos in 360p. HD video does play but it's choppy a bit.

Granted, the Acer won't be regularly used for YouTube or streaming video in general as my other PCs have Flash video acceleration, but it's still good to know 360p video runs rather nice on the Acer.

Next up, probably tomorrow, is getting out my old, large 160gb external drive and testing Linux on the Acer as it can boot off USB disks.

[RAMChYLD]

4:40 PM. 1 hour and 20 minutes to go.