New Acer Aspire AS574G-374G64Mn

I was in Perth yesterday, and I showed one of my Edubooks to the NGO person from India. After a short demo, she asked if I could install Windows on it.

Anyway, early this morning I bought the newspaper and saw a laptop advertised at Rick hart, just $529 and $99 cashback, bringing it down to only AU $430. Look at the specs:

http://www.cheapcheapdeals.com.au/retailer-deals/electronics/computers-laptops/acer-aspire-as5742g-374g64mn-laptop-on-sale-save-171-further-99-cashback/

I'm running it right now.

If the NGO person doesn't want my Edubook, I might donate my old laptop, an Acer Aspire 3681wxmi -- this has been my workhorse for years. I just did a quick search, I bought it back in November 2006:

http://puppylinux.com/news/news211-212.htm

It has though, become an increasing struggle. Slow 1.4GHz Celeron CPU, only 512MB RAM, 60GB HD. I do some very long compile jobs, like the T2 compile, that takes days. Just a few days ago when compiling SeaMonkey 2.2 I was listening to the hard drive thrashing, and thinking that I had to do something about it. Then there's storage, 60GB just doesn't cut it.

The old Acer has Windows XP, I will enlarge the partition, but probably leave a small ext3 partition with Puppy on it, plus a swap partition, and GRUB boot management.

My new laptop has Windows 7 Home Premium. I thought that I read somewhere that there is a problem with shrinking a HD partition that has Win7 on it? I need to do so, will have to research that.

The i3 370M CPU seems ok:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i3-370M-Notebook-Processor.32767.0.html

...curious, the CPU has on-chip graphics, yet the laptop has nVidia GeForce GT 420 graphics chip.

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Comments

Shrinking HDD
Username: GCMartin
Sound like a great purchase, Barry. Sorry about the NGO. Is there a possibility she may have been asking simple about possibility to run MS as well as what you were demo-ing??? Anyway YOUR question on NTFS and Windows7 MS includes a "disk manager" with Windows7 that does an excellent job of allowing you to manipulate the HDD in your new system. Should do everything you want in partitioning and keeping things straight. My past recommends that you used MS tool to manipulate the size, then use Linux to format the internal partitions. This should provide all the safety you would need. Hope this helps.

Acer and installation partition
Username: pemasu
"Acer laptops usually have installation partition. There should be image of win 7 partition in installer partition. You could check that and boot it to see if it offers win 7 installation. If it does...then.... You can delete win 7 partition. Shrink the partition and give that way more room for other stuff in now larger other partition. After shrinking the and modifying the partitions...... Launch the installer partition installer and install the win 7 to the now smaller partition. It worked with my acer 5820Tg laptop fine.

Shrinking the partition
Username: BarryK
"pemasu, Thanks for the info. Yes, it is easy, this site explains: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/ I have done it, knocked the C: partition right down and freed up 548GB!

menu.lst to boot win 7 inst part in acer
Username: pemasu
"Cut from my menu.lst. I use grub4dos. title Windows 7 installation partition find --set-root --ignore-floppies /bootmgr chainloader (hd0,0)/bootmgr

Shrinking Windows More
Username: CLAM01
"Barry, After shrinking Windows with the Windows built-in shrinker you can make Windows recovery disks (DVDs) and then wipe and "recover" your Windows on the new smaller partition, then use the Windows shrinker again to shrink it about half again. Then maybe do the same again to shrink again. You should be able to get 600 gb of your 640 gb disk free. The Windows partition will still have 20-30 gb free space you can store files in.

Re Win7 recovery discs
Username: BarryK
"CLAM01, Ah, yes, good idea. When I first started using Win7, it popped up a message about creating recovery DVDs, so I did, 3 of them, and another "drivers and applications" recovery DVD. I'm running Win7 now, it is informing me that the C: drive is 35.4GB with 11.2GB free. pemasu, The Disk Manager informs that there is also a 13GB "Recovery Partition" and a 100MB NTFS "SYSTEM RESERVED" partition. So, I will run that recovery program again, with the smaller NTFS partition.

Your old notebook
Username: Bill Thomson
"Hello Barry, Saw your post about you Acer 3681. I have the 3680 model. It turns out the Socket M Celerons can be replaced with a T5200, T5300, T5600 or T7200 Core 2 Duo. I put a T7200 in my 3680, and the performence increase was quite nice to say the least. If you don't want to buy a new processor, I have the old Celeron M (a 1.86Ghz CPU) that's yours if you want it. Here's a link you'll find with a lot of good info: http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/206137-upgraded-acer-3680-celeron-cpu-t5300.html

Partition on Laptop
Username: GCMartin
"Barry, there is one additional thing which could be of help to you. It involves size. When in Windows disk manager, you can option for the system to run the NTFS partition "Compressed". This has proven very very useful to me over the past years. Many are not aware of this benefit. Hope this helps

Missed AMD Fusion by Hairline
Username: Raffy
"You missed Acer's AMD Fusion laptops by a hairline! The fastest available Fusion "accelerated processor" (APU) is the E-350 with Radeon 6310 graphics and dual-core 1.6 Ghz processor. The slower build is the C-50 with Radeon 6250 graphics and 1.2 Ghz dual-core processor. These are all 64-bit, and the new tablets are coming out with the C-50. Small net-tops are using the E-350. Simply irresistible. :)

Tags: puppy