questions about acer aspire 5920

Hi

I'm new to this forum - but very pleased to have found it as you all seem so knowledgable and willing to help!!

i have had an acer aspire gemstone notebook (5920-3A2G16Mi) for 2 weeks and i have a few things to ask.

my notebook should have 160g hard disc. it is divided into 2 drives.

one is named ACER (C) and says 38.8gb free of 69.7gb and the other is named DATA (D) and says 66.1gbfree of 66.2 gb.
i know that a part is hidden or whatever and some of the disc is used for vista etc but does this sound right to you??? i haven't installed anything large - just avast instead of norton.
also when i click on the second drive no window opens or anything. so how can i use this? or will it just switch when the first drive is full?

i have previously used 98 and xp and i found it quite convenient to pull things out of the temp internet files and keep them. but nothing seems to go to the temp files with vista! are they hidden somewhere else??

when i go to youtube the clips won't stream - the whole notebook freezes until the clip downloads and it plays. i've uninstalled flash player and reinstalled the latest adobe one. also tried all the 'fixes' on the adobe help page. these worked once each - and then stopped. they were all security settings but when they were not permanent i set it aback to the default setting. this is annoying - even if i open a site that happens to have a playing flash (even just an ad!) the notebook freezes until it loads!!

i would appreciate any help
thanks

 

Welcome to the forums

With the hard drive, there will be an Acer recovery partition that will use up space, and a 160GB hard drive is actually only 148GBs, because the company's say one GB is one billion bytes, when it is actually 1,073,741,824 bytes.

As for the YouTube issue, try Mozilla Firefox ( www.getfirefox.com), I have had problems like this with Internet Explorer and it was fixed using Firefox.

 

Thanks - i would prefer not to have to istall firefox. but if i did how could i get the left side buttons to answer to that instead of ie? would i have to uninstall ie? with firefox would i be able to find things -) ) in the temp www files??

 

try downloading a REAL codec pack like KLITE full pack

or cccp

use the search button in my sig

 

Get Firefox plugin called "UnPlug" -- it can save various media formats from sites like YouTube. For playing FLV files I use FLV Player ( http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/flv-player/)

 

As for temporary files -- they are stored in hidden folder on C disk. Since it's VIsta, path is somewhat different.

Exact location can be found via IE

Star IE -> Tools -> Internet options
On General tab under "Browsing history" click "Settings" and you will see remark "Current location" --> this is place where IE store temp files.

Below is "Move folder" buton, which can be used to change location (IE restart required).

Since you are concerned by place, I suggest you make new folder on D, name it as you like (like IE_temporary_files), than go to this tab in IE and press "move folder", select this new location and confirm). Restart IE and you are done.

 

And I don't understand what do you mean by " also when i click on the second drive no window opens or anything. so how can i use this? or will it just switch when the first drive is full?"

Your disk D is "empty" -- there are some system files present and hidden (that's why some space is missing), otherwise drive is empty and waiting for you to fill it up, nothing to show, yet

As for freezing -- I found that my power settings (CPU speed) were set too low and caused major lag. Check this, maybe it's set too low.

And don't forget to update system with SP1, it can significally speed-up your system.

Good luck and have fun,
b.

 

thank you bigozone and sponka

Bigozone I looked at the K-lite codec page as you suggested and !!!!! why do i need all that stuff just to do things i was doing with windows 98!!!

perhaps i did not explain properly. further explainations below

Sponka so the second disk will just fill up when its needed? ok. i just expected at least an 'empty' window would open when i clicked on it.

should i have to mess around with the cpu speed on a brand new laptop - that i am not using for games?? it only freezes when youtube(etc) flv instead of streaming, downloads first before playing.

when i go to the path you said (ie-tools-internet options etc) there is a button called 'view files' when i click on that i get the temp files. with 98 and xp i would find tons of files including flvs and shockwave flash etc etc. with vista these are not there.
i would harvest these things i wanted from there- no problem.
but with vista they are not there!!! so does vista not hold these in the temp internet file??

i can get files from youtube etc with a site like 'keepvid' no problem and other sites like 'clipnabber'.
but not shockwave flash!!! and a 'flash grab' program i have never turns up anything whilst on 98 or xp it would harvest loads of these from the temp internet files that came from sites that use them.

i play flv on 'any flv player'.

when i first set up the laptop vista said i needed an udate and did it. i expect it was SP1 - doesn't it update by itself??

thank you for your interest and help - any more suggestions?

 

tumnastgt, bigozone and sponka
thanks so much for your suggestions.

!!!it turns out that i did not have SP1 installed after all - and when i did install it youtube streams!!
i can't believe it was just that!!!
thanks once again

 

You see, these forum members rock when it comes to help.

All you need to do now is rep them as a real thank you. (The grey thingie left of the red triangle on their helpful posts).

Cheers,
Theo