Notebooks & Netbooks

[Connor12123]

     I recently purchased an Acer Aspire V3-772g-9829 and have been setting it up periodically over the past couple of days. The laptop came with Windows 8 installed on it but I much prefer Windows 7 and after much hassle I was able to get Windows 7 installed and fully functional with all drivers working by following MrElussive's guide in this forum post http://bit.ly/1mgdpzM (post 4/5 on that page). Despite my preference to Windows 7, I am a programmer and need Windows 8 to program things for the Windows Marketplace so I installed VirtualBox onto the laptop and installed Windows 8 on a virtual machine image. Before I install Visual Studio 2013 on the virtual machine, I wanted to upgrade to Windows 8.1.

     I have done this process on my desktop without problem but on the laptop it isn't working. I went to the driver support page for this model of laptop and followed the instructions. I updated my BIOS to the latest version and I uninstalled both the Intel and Nvidia VGA drivers as the guide said but I still cannot upgrade to Windows 8.1. On the page for upgrading to Windows 8.1 I see a message that says "Sorry, you can't install the update because it's not supported by your computer's CPU." I know the CPU supports Windows 8.1 and I have the system requirements met as I have allocated 4gb of RAM for the virtual machine to use while it runs but the problem persists. I assume the problem lies in the drivers I have installed but I'm not totally sure. I don't want to digress the setup I have put into this laptop too much so I am here asking for help.

     My next guess would be to uninstall the "Intel iAMT Driver" as this may be the problem but I figured it would be best to get someone else's opinion on the matter especially since I have to handle the drivers on the main system via my Windows 7 install and whatever I do to the drivers in an attempt to accomodate the Windows 8.1 upgrade will affect both the laptop's Windows 7 and virtual machine's Windows 8 OS's. Both the Windows 7 and Windows 8 installs are activated with valid, legal activation keys and the only hardware change I have made to the system is I installed a Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256gb which is the primary drive for this system and has the OS as well as all the programs and drivers installed on it. Anyone know exactly how to fix the problem or have any ideas on what the source of the conflict may be?

[JackE]

Have you considered trying one of VMWare's players instead of Vbox? I have Win98SE, WinXP3, a SuSE version as Win7 guests under a VMWare freeware player. Run all at the same time. Communicate between all on the network. I find the player is fairly bulletproof. Haven't tried a Win8x guest, nor do I have any reason whatsoever to tempt fate and try it yet. You, on the other hand,  seem to have a good reason for doing so. 8^)

Jack E/NJ

[Connor12123]

     I am quite busy and have already invested a significant amount of time in setting up everything I have thus far with the laptop (especially considering the holiday has eaten up a fair amount of free time as well) so I haven't had time to look for alternative programs; I was just using Virtual Box because I have had success with it before. Thank you for the suggestion though. I will look into VMWare when I have time and make another post with updates on how well it worked probably within a week. I envy people like you who don't have to bother with the hassle of Win 8.x haha.