Aspire 4315 Win XP Wi-Fi question/problem

warofages

I just received an old Acer Aspirce 4315 as a gift and I plan on giving it to my girlfriend to use. I received it with Windows Vista on it. Thing is, I hate Vista. So I went ahead and put Windows XP Pro SP3 on it. Everything was fine until I realized after installing the wireless drivers provided on the Acer website, that the Wi-Fi wasn't working. Also, in Device Manager, it was still showing that I have yet to install a driver for the Ethernet Controller. I can't find any answers to this question anywhere so I figured I'd come here and ask once more. Is it possible for this laptop to have Wi-Fi on WINDOWS XP or does it only work on what the laptop came with (Vista)? The Wi-Fi button on the left does nothing and triggers no lights or messages on the computer itself. My girlfriend and I would consider the laptop useless if it did not have Wi-Fi capabilities. So is there ANY way to get it working with XP or am I stuck upgrading back to Vista so the Wi-Fi will work?

 

Thanks.

Vince53

Anything is possible, but changing the operating system on a laptop is far more difficult than on a desktop. Laptops drivers are far more specific, and the hardware is designed to run with the original operating system.  Like you, I can't stand Vista, BUT, surprisingly, Vista is better than XP when you have a computer that can run it well..

 

Your laptop was designed from the ground up for Vista. I have found several reviews of your rig, and they agree that it runs well, although slowly (After all, you do have a Celeron chip and problably have only 1 gig of RAM). Your original Vista installation includes all of the correct drivers and your hardware is designed to work with Vista. I would advise you to re-install Vista.

Leho

Waro

You should really listen to Vince.

I will add that while you may hate Vista, in the scenario that you outline that doesn't really carry any weight. Surely it is your girlfriend's preferences of Operating Systems that should take precedence

Leho

warofages

Okay well I figured I'd go ahead and do that. Popped my CD in, rebooted and got to where I select the drive to put the OS on. For both drives, it's giving me a "Windows is unable to install to the selected location. Error: 0x80300001" error. Both the normal 'C:' and the 'Data' drives are both formatted. Why am I getting this error that is preventing me from going ahead and installing Vista? I'm reading up that this may have something to do with a driver CD (which I do not have) but the post claimed the guy had the driver CD in and had to put the Install CD back in and it worked. There is no driver CD in the laptop....

 

Also, I plan on getting another 1GB stick for this so it runs more smoothly than with just one gig. It's only $18 so why not. But this is IF I get this copy of Vista installed... -_-

Vince53

Pkay, you might be trying to install Vista with the driver CD. There should also be an installation DVD with Vista on it. You have to install that first.

 

If your hard drive has more than one partition, you must install the OS on the primary partition (usually C).

 

If you're sure that you are using the installation DVD, here is a complicated procedure from another site:

 

Re: Vista Installation error 0x80300001

---

                                                                    Follow the following steps:

1. Insert the install DVD
2. Boot into the setup process
3. Get to the point where you need to select a partition and click Load Driver
4. Insert driver DVD
5. Locate the storage driver, in my case the AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller
6. Notice the message "Windows cannot be installed on this disk. (Show details)" at the bottom
7. Insert the install DVD back into the drive
8. Expand the advanced drive options
9. Create a New partition consuming some amount of space, in my case all of it
10. Windows says it had to do some funky stuff, click OK
11. Notice that there is a 200MB system partition and a new primary partition

Select the new primary partition and click Next
From there setup will continue, life will be good, and you can enjoy RAID (and probably AHCI) support on your system.

warofages

That's the problem here lol, I do not have a driver disc. I was not given one. How am I going to load the drivers without the issued drivers disc? My first thought would be to create a data disc and slap all of the Vista drivers onto it, unzipping them first of course, and burn it. Will this work? Or is there some other way or program that can build me a readable drivers disc so that when I pop it in at the 'Load driver' screen, it will definitely read the drivers? Just asking before I go ahead and waste time and a blank disc to do this. Also, if and when I do create this drivers disc, should I put the drivers on the blank disc as sorted folders or should I place every individual file for the drivers all on the disc. If that's confusing, should I make the disc have, say, 7 folders that include the drivers within them or have a disc full of allllll of the individual driver files (which would not be just '7' folders but hundreds of files)?