Wow – this was crazy. A few random notes before I actually write this page:
The hard drive has to be wiped completely clean – I used Linux and command line “stuff” to delete all partitions, and, the boot record. Otherwise the discs failed to work. I did not format the drive in any way – no parition table, etc.
It’s incredibly slow – and you need 5 discs: Acer System CD, 4 DVDs including the language DVD,
As I said, it’s slow, and the thing will reboot a lot of times before you get a desktop.
At one point – and I failed to take a pic – as the thing is rebooting and installation is almost done you’re asked to choose between some sort of tweaked version (I cannot recall the language) and something else. I chose the box that was something else, and, I ticked a box that was labeled “generalize”. I have no freaking idea what I was choosing in the GUI menu.
When it was finally installed it said (1) it was not activated, and, there were three or four drivers missing. I found the driver issue weird as I was using Acer recovery discs for the correct model. Go figure.
Referring to the above: I found all of the missing driver…and I am going to post them for download on this page.
There was a fairly complex problem with Windows update. This will require it’s own damned section.
Getting Windows Update to Work
Okay. Windows update was mightily confused and simply would not work. The fix was the follwing:
- You need to manually install two updates, in a certain order, but they wouldn’t install until I did the following.
- These updates, which I will name in a moment, will fix the update problem but they will fail to install until you delete the contents of the folder at C:Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore. Well, not being a Windows person I was refused permission to delete these files running a terminal as admin, or, using PowerShell. I don’t know what I’m doing on Windows, and, the Internet said that this should be possible. Anyway, I used a Linux live disc to mount the partition and delete those files. Then the installion of the following two updates worked.
- Install two updates, which I will post links to, in the folliwing order:
I had a problem getting these to install. You may have to open services.msc and turn off Windows Update. If that doesn’t work just try rebooting. For the life of me I cannot recall exactly what I did to get these to work.