Acer Travelmate 5720g -biggest mistake ive ever done pcwise.

A few weeks ago I bought an Acer Travelmate 5720g.

Heres the good things: Surprisingly good buildquality.

Heres the bad things: Low res/low brightness screen. X2500 graphics card, its a x1700 in disguise, what a dissapointment that was. Low battery time, normal use gets you about 1.5 hour, with max brightness, wifi and light workload.

Heres the REALLY bad things: Acer support impossibly to get in touch with, tryed emailing them, and calling them, after waiting 40 mins in line and getting swapped from ringing tone, to waiting music a couple of time I gave up. Not compatible with windows xp. Yes, thats right, you cant install windows xp on this laptop, theres no way to disable native sata support in the bios, so it simply wont install.


All in all, I shoulda just gotten a T60p used instead. Woulda been about the same price, the same performance, and I would actually have a usable xp machine with a decent battery life and resolution on my screen.


Conclusion: NEVER buy or recommend an acer to anyone ever again.



Oh yea and while im at it, im done with ATI/AMD as well. What kinda retarded tactic is it to just rebrand old technology so it melts with current gen?? Im talking about x1400>x2300 and now x1700>x2500. This is both confusing and plain out wrong since they have theyr 2400hd and 2600hd wich is next gen but seems so similar numberwise.

But ok, AMD has been doing nothing good for the last couple years, so I guess this is just the last few spasms from the dying goliath (err make that david).

 

Well, just a little notice, the low battery life is Vista's fault.You should disable the EyeCandy, I expect that will give the battery life a boost.

 

ive already disabled the so called eye candy, the 1.5 hour is with all that off. With eye candy on it barely manages 1 hour.

 

I did hear some depressing news about the battery life of X1700 on some laptops.
Did you try the latest drivers ?

 

Yes I did use the latest drivers.

I think the x1700 is fine, its just acer that sucks.

 

thanks for the info about build quality! I am just waiting a couple more weeks for 5920 Poor you, next time do some research before spending so much money on something you don't like

 

Just so you know in future to install xp on that laptop you wound need to intergrate the drivers for your sata controler into windows xp sources

or use a use floppy disk and add the mass stroage device use f6 dureing the installstation of xp


it seem acer has no sata drivers for that model on website if you can tell me who make sata controler the brand am sure that they are some

am guess this is pretty new model cause not alot info on they website

My guess it wound use the intel sata drivers for 965 model on they website

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/fil...e+Edition&lang=eng&strOSs=45&submit=Go%21

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...&OSFullName=Windows* XP Home Edition&lang=eng


if you want xp you can use nlite to intergrate sata drivers into new windows cds winch shound let you install

 

Kinda hard to do research on a product nobody has ever seen.

And half the sites listing it lists the wrong specs (2600HD graphics for instance).


Fact is AMD/ATI is total asshats. Renaming a x1700 to x2500 is nothing but confusing and lame.

Ill never buy anything AMD/ATI/Acer ever again.

Good thing thinkpads are all intel/nvidia now.

 

I'll never stray from Nvidia and Intel. Too bad about your notebook. You really should have waited for a 5920g.

I thought the x2500 was a really good card, comparable to a 8600GT, until I realised it was a renamed x1700.

Come to think of it, what new cards have ATi released, or when is that last time you heard of AMD?

This must be the worst buy out in the technological world. AMD has worsened competition by buying ATi.

 

Hi Kiriath

I'm considering to buy 5720G
http://acer.verasys.ro/promo/notebook_acer_travelmate_5720g_102g16~122251, do you have same model?
Do I get Santa Rosa notebook with this model?

 

Managed to dual boot myself on an Acer Travelmate 5720G.
A few words before I begin:

My laptop came with Vista Home installed on C: and I also had another NTFS partition (E.

Before you start, do the Acer e-recovery "Factory default disc" (I needed two blank dvds).

Also, it is smart to do the "Create driver and application backup disk" (1 DVD).

Also, I went to the Acer download page, and downloaded all drivers, for XP and Vista for this model, and the applications. WARNING: this step is very recomended, but know that the whole pack is pretty big, a bit over 1Gb and its coming with a max of 60kBps. I had double bandwith so I downloaded two drivers/apps constantly, to shorten the time.

If you need to do the install quickly, I recommend you download the lan drivers for xp. But even if you do this only, you'll need to download all the drivers when in XP, so better do it now that you have a working OS (Vista).

To get to work:

First you need to make a WIN XP CD that can see your hard-drive. I used nlite (see link below) to add the sata drivers (go to the link and select F6 Intel SATA HDD Driver Floppy utility) and the Intel® Matrix Storage Manager.

In the two links above you will find two .exe files that you need to run on a computer with a floppy drive. You insert an empty disk in the floppy and after the install is over, copy all the files from the created floppy disk to a separate directory on your hard drive. Then you use nlite. Copy the Win XP CD on your drive, and select that location when you start nlite. After you choose the directory with XP in nlite, click next till you see the "Task selection" table. There you select from "Integrate" - "Drivers" and from "Create" - "Bootable ISO" (when selected,the red spots become green). Then hit next and on the new screen "Insert" - "Multiple driver folder" - go to the directory where SATA driver is first (the one copied from the floppy earlier - it should have some .inf files in it). Hit OK and then select the path that appears and click OK again. In the new window select all the options (using shift not ctrl as it propmpts). Let "textmode driver" option checked. Then click OK. Then Insert again and do the same thing with the matrix storage manager driver. Then click next - "apply changes" - ok, etc. It will add the drivers to the XP install. Then click next and in new windows that appears select for "General" - "Mode" - "direct burn". Insert an empty cd and click "Burn" (Do not click next untill you burn the cd). Voooila you have a valid xp setup, that worked at least in my case - it saw the hard drive (which it previousley did not see) and installed xp flawlessly, with the restart booting directly to XP.

Once in XP:

I installed all drivers and applications from the Acer site (for XP).

!Attention: install only one driver for the webcam (there are 3 on the site). People say it will crash XP if you install more then one.

Restarted twice, once after all the drivers were installed, then after the apps were installed. Restart with no fear, it will boot to win xp.

From here, it gets a little tricky.

You need to recover the vista boot.

Following advice on a forum I don't have a link to, I tried to copy the vista boot files to the xp partition. I'm not sure if this helped at all, cause after I did all the steps and restarted, I DID NOT see the dual boot menu. But I did it, and it may have helped?

My advice is skip this part, but if the rest does not work and you're desperate here it is:

a) in XP go to folder options and enable "see hidden files" si "show protected operating system files"

b) then copy from the vista partition, from the "Boot" folder the following files:

"bootmgr", "boot.ini", NTDETECT.COM, "ntdlr"

and paste them in the root of your XP drive.

c) download Vista Boot Pro. to run it you need Net framework 2.0 (i had it installed in a cool XP that I have) but you can download it I guess.

In Vista Boot Pro, open the tab "System Bootloader" and choose open "BCD Restore Path" - go to the Vista partition - C: for me - and in the boot folder, you'll find a .bcd file (recovery file). Load it.

d) then in the "manage os entries" tab - "add new os entry" - select "Windows Legacy" and give this entry the name "Win XP". Select the letter of the partition with XP and then hit apply.

e) theoretically you restart and you see the dual boot menu - i did not see it, it loaded xp again.

So, I was desperate. I researched the net and found this software: Easy BCD 1.7.1. In it I chose "Manage bootloader" - "reinstall the Vista Bootloder". It did, so back in view settings, I only saw Win Vista again (before XP appeared since I played with the other software - vista boot pro). The I clicked "Add/remove entries" and I added my xp ("Type":Windows NT/2k/XP"). IMPORTANT: I left the Drive letter C: for XP as well even if it was on E:. Then cliked on add entry - and closed the soft and restarted:

VICTORY!!!

DUAL BOOT MENU!!!!!!!!

Many thanks to all those who tried to solve this puzzle on the net, it helped a lot! Without you I would not have XP and Vista on my laptop!!

Hope it works for you too,

all the best!

Adrian - Romania

 

Hi, i also did the mistake to buy this laptop (aspire 5720G) and I installed xp by changing the setting of the bios (from a Sata to an IDE acknowledgement it is lower but it works).

Unfortunately nearly nothing works on XP because I need drivers and Acer removed drivers for XP on his website, so I am looking for these drivers desesperately.

Someone could help me to find these ****ing drivers that should me really nice!

 

@vivien (Newbie)

Please don't revive old threads like these. Original post was almost a year ago and serves no purpose now. Except to flame.

Bye bye,
Theo