I recently bought an Acer TravelMate 4230, equipped with Acer’s Windows Vista Business. I put Office 2007 on it (plus my usual development tools) and it ran unbelievably slowly. Even with 2 Gb RAM it was awful. I use Outlook all the time and just hated being at work because of it’s speed and non-responsiveness. I have hardly been able to do any development work and even writing a letter has become a chore (it was made slightly better by adding Word 2003). I’ve lived with it for a couple of months simply because I didn’t have the time to rebuild it.

 

Last week I took the plunge and installed a 'proper copy' (not an Acer OEM version) of Vista. Everything went well and the basic system was noticeably faster.

 

I then installed good old Office 2003, SQL 2005, VS etc. and it was still fine and still fast. Which is when I noticed that it had only recognized one of the two DRAMM chips and was in fact faster on only 1 Gb RAM than it had been on 2 Gb! But, I couldn't find the missing PCI MEM (PCI FLASH) drivers for the extra DRAMM slot and Acer didn’t have them either.

 

About this time I also realized that Vista wouldn't activate, and a call to Microsoft confirmed that I had installed the wrong version for the partner product keys we have. I decided to go back to the Acer recovery image to see if that had the drivers. But, the recovery disk I’d been prompted to make wasn't a real recovery disk; it doesn't boot - apparently Acer uses a hidden partition with the recovery tools on it. So I spent a couple of hours learning how to read DOS partitions with a live Unix OS, got the utilities I needed, created a boot disk and discovered that it still wouldn't restore because the version of Windows had changed and there was no backup or CD of the Acer version of windows. That’s right, Acer do not ship any OEM CDs with their notebooks.

 

At that point I had a super fast system, which used only half the installed RAM and had only about 24 days remaining before activation shut it down!

 

Acer tech support in the US said the required PCI MEM (or PCI FLASH) drivers were on their website but it was down at the moment. When the site came back, the drivers weren't there, and when I called back (and spoke to someone else) they said the drivers didn't exist.

 

Acer in the UK said there could be a hardware fault but they couldn’t fix it because it was a US machine. They would though, sell me the recovery CDs which included Windows Vista and the missing drivers for 50 quid. (It was just $40 from the US!)

 

Since we get some technical support incidents from Microsoft as part of the Partner program, I decided to use one - value GBP 200. We get five of these each year, and the last one we used was back in the year 2000, so I didn’t feel too bad about using one. It took nearly two hours for the technician to call back, but when he did he could not have been more helpful. He carefully listened to the problem and made sure he understood it. He used Google to try to search for answers and sent me a link that he wanted me to try. When that didn't get the answers we wanted, he initiated a conference call with Acer technical support. Surprisingly, Acer resisted the might of the call from Microsoft and steadfastly refused to provide the drivers that would make their notebook's RAM work with (retail) Windows Vista. However, they did confirm that these PCI MEM drivers do exist and that they would not provide them.

 

Although MS support was unable to resolve the issue, I was very impressed with the service and professionalism. I liked that he volunteered the information that he hadn't done anything which I hadn't already tried, and I especially liked that he said the case would only be closed when my notebook showed the full 2 Gb. Today, the matter has been escalated within Microsoft, so they can petition Acer for the drivers, but through another channel.

 

Meanwhile I managed to find the correct license keys for Vista, so I do now have a working PC. Hurray!

 

The very first notebook I ever bought was an Acer and it was great. Wow, have they changed.