OUCH! New Acer Laptop VISTA Hoops.. All better now!!

dctommy Newbie

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Be CAREFUL when you boot up the first time!!

O.M.G. finally after taking 3 new Vista laptops back to the store I was finally able to get a security suite working satisfactorily! To make matters worse, only one brand now includes recovery disks in the box. I paid Circuit City an extra $29 to make me a set, only to take back that unit to exchange for an identical one, after the tech opted for automatic Windows updates, and Windows Defender (the built in firewall included with Windows) evaporated half way through an update. I since went out on the web and found that Vista starts to CRAWL after it adds the standard updates. SO! With my third virgin unit, I went into the defender window and shut off updates entirely.

My new PC comes with a 90 day Norton trial, but after past experiences I immediately removed this program.

On my second unit, when I opened up the Windows Defender Icon, I decided to update the malware protection file offered free from Microsoft, and then proceeded to select a virus suite from the list provided there by Microsoft. I selected CA because I had used them before and found it to be transparent, effective, and much faster than others. However this time the computer started to totally CRAWL. Even after removing the program the system did not seem to behave as fluidly.. The thing that really pissed me off was that I wanted to only buy the virus feature and just use the standard firewall features included with Windows defender. But the minute I installed it, all the other features disappeared, basically forcing me to upgrade to the full security suite.

So after a night of frustration and lost sleep I returned the second unit and got my third virgin laptop from the store.

Let me just mention that on the first unit I made the mistake of trying to download Zune... a Microsoft music service, touted to be like Itunes... guess what! This caused damage to the Vista operating system...

A major conclusion that I drew here is that many of these major names are selling software, claiming that it works with Vista, but it actually ends up thrashing it. In each case I could see that it was not working the same after adding a new application.

During the daytime at my job I did an enorormous amount of checking around on the web, and found a virus checker from India called Quickheal. In reading what I could find it seemed to be low resource intensive and to have involved close collaboration with Microsoft to insure Vista compatibility.

I have spent time in Asia and found everything technological to be months ahead of the US, and India may very well be the software capital of the world. This is essentially where Yahoo and Photoshop are programmed. So I decided to give it a shot.

Guess what: it works BEAUTIFULLY. The Windows defender picked up the presence of the program and kept right on working the way it's supposed to. Barely any time was added to my boot up, and installation was extremely brief to say the least. My Vista laptop is working perfectly.

BTW... I got an Acer 5720 with 2 gigs of memory... just $529...

Follow up::

After all my twisting and shouting.. Everything is now working BEAUTIFULLY...

This is the first time I have ever seen a Microsoft platform PC that actually feels faster
than the previous generation...

This morning my new virus program picked up a trojan when I booted up... no sweat...

I find only a few second delay on bootup and no appreciable interference with web activity...

These are two issues I have seen with both NOD32 and ZoneAlarm... not to mention extra network traffic that can be felt from other PC's on our home wireless network...

The last headache that I resolved with this new laptop was the audio quality...

Initially the music sounded totally tinny... like it was in a bathroom...
and none of the EQ features would work...

I clicked the default button and all audio disappeared...

Initially I started to freak after all I've been through...

But once I calmed down went out and downloaded the latest Realtek driver...

Funny thing was... it started working right away... but still low quality...

A couple of hours later (after the install) a little red icon appears down in the
lower right of my screen called RealTek HD Audio Manager... and now the sound is
absolutely stunning...

I guess Vista has to "think" about these things for awhile?confused.gif

Whatever...

I'm totally stoked now...

Obviously I'm a newbie... so go easy on me.. K??

I jumped through a lot of hoops to get to this point, and I wanted to share what actually worked... For ME!

One more thing!!

Oh yeah... There was one more little headache that almost caused me to send the third unit back! Every time I tried typing the cursor would start jumping around to different places... I figured out that it had something to do with bumping the mouse pad.. I opened up the little mouse pad control icon in the lower right... and looked around.. apparently it has some kind of "tap" feature... Initially I just checked the box to disable it while typing but afterwards just disabled this feature completely... NOW no more jumping cursor!!