Check my hardware and drivers

davidmarshall00

06Jun2015 - Hi to All - I am new to the Acer Community and am looking forward to asking a question or two and even answering some too.  My current experience now includes running Windows 10 Preview on my Acer Aspire Laptop 5250.  The new operating system is installed over top of Windows 7 Home Premium. Win10 worked perfectly (I started in May/15 so most of the bugs had been worked out) and I am really amazed at how smoothly the new Windows functionality works on the Acer's hardware.  Fast too.

    This brings me to why I am here now in the Acer community.  I would like to check my hardware and drivers currently on this laptop since February 2012, but I cannot ask questions of the Acer staff because my laptop is now "Ancient!" and the staff are busy.  Can anyone point me to a location, URL, etc where I might find hacks, updates, and notes that I could use to build my experitise on this machine.  I still have my original Apple IIe, disk drives and floppies, memory cards, etc which may help to explain my focus on the past. 
     My experience includes a decent computer background going back to August 1963...which makes me older than a lot of dirt.  I enjoy reading about computer security issues for home users and I did a stint of a couple of years in 2003 to 2006 as a help desk analyst having graduated from a community college with a very decent mark and an award.  Woo!  So I'm bragging, not to win any prizes, but to let you know I am serious.  I want to see these awesome chunks of hardware continue as a useful addition to my collection of communications devices and help others do the same.   All topics open for discussion.

    All comments welcome.  Thanks for being here.

 

[subject line edited to reflect new topic]

JordanB

davidmarshall00,

 

Recently Microsoft released a Windows update for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.  It's an optional update for Windows 7 (I think).  This Windows update that I'm referring to.... does a hardware and driver check on your computer.  Apparently the update automatically schedules 4 tasks (in the task scheduler) that will run in the coming weeks.  Most people will see a little Windows icon down in the lower right part of the screen if you installed the update.

 

Apparently there will be multiple driver and hardware checks performed by this update.... leading up to the release of Windows 10.

 

Microsoft also released updates (through Windows update) that allow those that aren't in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Progam to activate it so that Microsoft can gather data on the drivers and hardware and work with OEMs such as Acer to try to make the transistion go as smoothly as possible.  I get the feeling that a lot of people opt out of WCEIP when they first setup their computer (oops--including me) so I would imagine that Microsoft doesn't have the volume of data that it would like.

 

Anyway, if you re-install your Windows 7, you can use Windows update to get the *optional* update that you need in order to see what are the current problems.

 

I'm running Windows 8.1, and the only problem that it reported was the Atheros Bluetooth hardware/driver.  I'm not worried about as I'm sure they'll have a driver available by the time Windows 10 is released.  When I used Windows 10 Technical Preview, Windows update installed most everything I needed.  The rest of the drivers I was able to get from Acer downloads or directly from the component manufacturer.  I'm sure in the coming weeks, they'll update to the appropriate drivers.

 

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers

 

http://www.zdnet.com/article/get-windows-10-microsofts-hidden-roadmap-for-the-biggest-software-upgrade-in-history/

 

If you need help getting Windows 7 back on your computer, I'm sure someone will steer you in the right direction.  There's been a lot of folks on this forum that have had difficulty getting back to Windows 7 or Windows 8 after they installed Windows 10 techincal preview.  Conventional restore methods haven't worked.  For example, I tried to revert back to Windows 8.1 using a backup image.  No cigars.  Then I tried to use my Factory default USB backup.  Again, no cigars.  So I had to get creative.