Best of all you don't have to crack your laptop open. Oh, not scared of taking apart your Acer? Okay then. Roughly under the mousepad on the top of the motherboard is a small four-pin plug. If you can find a small plug to fit it, and are decent with a soldering iron, then you can modify a USB Bluetooth adapter to fit here.
Just do a search for "acer bluetooth," and make sure the plug has a four-pin. Why do you need Bluetooth? You don't. But it can be nice for transferring file to and from your cellphone, or using a wireless mouse. Plus it makes that switch on the front of your laptop actually do something! The Wifi card is an Intel It works just fine, but eventually you could switch to an I ended up swapping mine out with a spare The stock CPU, at first glance, is nothing special.
It's a Intel Core 2 Duo T; that's 1. It uses the new Socket P design, however. That's a good thing for a number of reasons. This uses the Meron core, and supports a bus up to MHz. They both run at 35W, so in theory your battery life and heat output won't suffer.
The T is also a 45 nm cpu, as opposed to the original 65 nm T This specific upgrade has been reported to really beef things up- even Vista goes from 4. That ones a 2. I'm personally not in a hurry to upgrade, for various reasons. Using XP, the dual core 1. I've also been watching the prices drop and speeds increase on Socket-P cpu's. I will eventually upgrade, but why rush? The longer I wait, the cheaper and faster a cpu I can get for my money.
The cpu can be swapped out through the bottom 'hatch' without a ton of difficulty. I can't give step-by-step instructions as I haven't done this, but I don't see any huge hurdles to overcome. Enthusiasts sometimes actually redo this themselves simply to improve heat dissipation on their stock cpu's. That's right- software for your cpu.
The stock T cpu has another nifty, little-known characteristic. If we take advantage of it, we can make our laptops run cooler and gain battery life! This cpu was used in a lot of notebooks, being one of the most 'budget' cpu's for the Socket-P design. Old-school overclockers will understand over-volting. Basically, you're running a cpu on more voltage that it is designed for. This increases heat, uses more power, and shortens the life of the chip. Why do it? To get things running faster- to burn the candle on both ends, so to speak.
It's a combination of getting the most for your money, and a plain geek-rep do-it-for-the-sake-of-doing-it challenge. It's almost never a wise idea for laptops The opposite concept is under-volting. The idea is that all cpu's do not require the full manufacture voltage to run. Lowering the voltage creates less heat, uses less power, and if anything extends the life of the chip! What's the down side? On most cpu's, if you lower the voltage too much it will cause instability read, BSOD. But here's where our little "budget" chipset really shines.
Instead of a deafult 1. Doing so decreased my cpu temps by more than 10C, and increased my battery life by minutes. Get the walkthrough on the changes here ; for any other cpu, follow the instructions exactly. Just to be safe, I have mine set as shown in the picture slightly higher per each multi , though I ran for a solid week at the minimum voltage with no problems.
If you notice any instability under high load, simply bump the higher multipliers up a notch or two. These are a collection of tweaks I learned over the past few months using this laptop. Tweaking the video: The X Intel video is hardly for gaming. However, there's a few things you can do.
First off, it is advertised as having "Up to MB" of shared graphics memory under Vista. Installing XP, it becomes MB! Not a bad upgrade either the increased video memory or the faster OS ; To get a little more of an edge, download and install the latest driver from Intel. Open Graphics Properties.
Under Display Settings, hit Power Settings. Here you can improve things slightly by being more energy-wasteful. Under 3D settings, you can also change the "Driver Memory Footprint" to High, which supposedly may help. Tweaking the performance: I've already written an XP tweak-guide , so I'll keep this short.
If you have 14 taskbar icons next to your clock, it takes five minutes to boot up, and you keep getting "low disk space" warnings, you don't need new hardware.
You need an hour of easy software maintenance. Tweaking the battery: A while back I forgot the charger for my laptop when I left for work. Bugger, I thought, I can get an hour, maybe a little more out of this battery! First, I used the under-voltage trick. Remember, less voltage, less heat, less power consumed. Not only does this keep standard hardware use to a minimum, but it runs the T cpu at Mhz instead of 1. The how-to from Microsoft is here for setting up Profiles.
I created a new one, rebooted, and entered it. Setting the timer at 5 or 10 seconds instead of the default 30 might keep you from gnashing your teeth in impatience during startup. Now the fun begins We open the device manager and start disabling anything we can live without for the next three hours. DVD drive? Not needed.
PC Card slot? SD card? Disable them all. Since I'm on Ethernet and have the volume muted, I disabled Wifi and the audio card as well. I then turned the brightness down as far as it would go, and closed every application but the Firefox tabs I was using. This laptop turned out to be a smart purchase. It has future upgrade-ability, has held up well the past half a year, and is pretty easy to work on. As I previously stated, the Intel X graphics are the weak point here, but for the light- or non-gamer like me, it's sufficient.
My screensavers look good anyway! I'll likely add in the Bluetooth module I built and call it good for another six months. He enjoys tearing down the wall of ignorance between end-users and the 'experts' that charge hundreds for poor service. When not servicing laptops for everyone he's ever met on the west coast including their families, their neighbors, their dogs, and anyone else they so kindly offer his services to , his hobbies include electronics, satellite, streaming web video, British sci-fi, and occasionally writing tech Instructables.
I have bios v1. I recently bought and Extensa and would definitely like to install XP. Vista is a dog. Could someone give me the rundown on what I need to do that. Thank You. I mean, really I'll try and be as detailed as I can about how I did it. If you follow these directions, it's pretty easy: 1. Don't immediately wipe Vista! It's actually useful for another hour or so. Use Acer's backup software to do two things- first, a Full Backup of your system. Trust me, if you ever have to send your Acer in for servicing, it better have Vista on it or your warranty could be voided.
Plus, someday when you sell it, uninformed people think it's a plus point Secondly, why bother downloading random drivers you hope are the right ones? Acer makes it easy with its Driver and Application backup CD creator. If you've already wiped it, or just want the latest available, grab them from here. Write this down. This info is important later, and it can be difficult to find out without some annoying trial and error.
On the Boot tab, change it so your DVD drive is first. Save changes and exit. Pop in your XP CD and install like normal. The Recovery CD's we made -should- put everything back as it was, if we ever need it. After formatting my GB drive it's GB. Being on really new hardware it won't autodetect everything, but Don't Panic.
Once we're at the desktop, change your resolution to x, then start installing drivers some setup program buttons are cut off in the default x You probably want to start with the chipset driver, then the video drivers, sound, etc. On the Extensa , you will likely have no sound at first and end up with a 'PCI Device' that is unknown; just right-click it and choose Update Driver.
Let it automatically find it it's the HD audio , and your sound should work after the next reboot. I rebooted every time it wanted to, then installed the next driver.
This way they don't clash or get misconfigured. The webcam driver both original and latest on the FTP appears to install and work fine, but makes your system hang when shutting down. Until we get a better driver, I just disable it to avoid having to hard crash every time. In theory, you can just enable it whenever you need to use it.
Everything working OK now? No exclamation marks or unknown hardware? Now let's conquer the AHCI issue. This will pop up the setup utility. Click through it- it's not actually installing, but extracting the drivers for us to use. Right-Click on that and select Update Driver.
Choose No to connecting to Windows Update to search, then hit Next. Select Install from a list or specific location Advanced , hit Next, then select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install.
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