Acer Aspire S7-191

MikeZen

I'm so disappointed with this outwardly beautiful notebook. Little did I realize, less than 3 years ago when I bought this 4th generation Intel i5 cpu notebook, I would be stuck with a useless LEMON in 2016. Yes, Windows 8/8.1 were ugly, that's for sure, and yes, I should have realized when the ram maxed out at a pathetic 4 Gb, it had a very limited mother board and was far, far away from being future proof, but hey, I fell for its beauty and charm. At the time of purchase, I was tossing up between this model and the Acer Aspire S7-393, as I already have a 5th generation Intel i7 cpu desktop, and being a Forex Currency Trader, I needed something very portable, but modestly powerful and the beauty of this machine was a bonus. When trading in restaurants and coffee shops I could not reacall the number of compliments this machine attracted.

Why would Acer design and produce such a wonderful looking machine with such deliberate short comings? Then Microsoft released Windows 10 for free, who wouldn't want to upgrade? However, for those who did not want to exercise a recovery within a certain timeframe, you lost your original OS (Windows 8), and that was my experience. Now I'm stuck with a machine of very limited capability, the wifi no longer works, and Acer could not care less, and for this privilege, I paid over AU$1000.

I own 3 Acer devices; there will never be a 4th.

philetus

That laptop nagged you when it was new to make a Factory default backup. A recovery, so if something happened you could recover it to the way you received it from Acer.

https://store.acer.com/en-us/extended/recovery/

MikeZen

Tell me what other vendor produces a $1000 plus machine with such limitations, that is less than 3 years old, and can't run Windows 10?

Acer has deliberately taken a very conservative attitude to Windows 10, with respect to the Aspire S7-191. I looked at their matrix telling you what machines were supported for Windows 10. There are more than 5 notebooks released around the same time as mine, that are supported. Further, when Windows 10 was first officially released on July 29, 2015, my Aspire S7-191 worked as expected with full functionality, then sometime in March 2016 upon a Windows 10 update, I lost most function key functions including wifi. Now I have a $1000 plus paper weight, not a functioning 3 year old notebook. Thanks Acer. Like I said before, I have 3 Acer devices; there will never be a 4th...

Cory-Acer

Hi Mike,

 

I'm sorry to see how frustrated you are with the situation. Unfortunately we had to draw a line on what we could commit to supporting with the Windows 10 upgrade. This upgrade was a new experience and vastly different than previous upgrades which we not free or we're only available for a few months prior to the new OS release and encompassed a much smaller set of hardware. There are certainly learning opportunities that we look to improve upon in the future.

 

As far as your device, You are correct that the 'Go-Back' feature of Windows 10 is removed after about a month, but I might suggest downloading Windows 8.1 off of the MS site if you don't have access to recovery media. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows8

 

Thanks,
Cory

TimelineX

Hi Mike,

 

>Further, when Windows 10 was first officially released on July 29, 2015, my Aspire S7-191 worked as expected

>with full functionality, then sometime in March 2016 upon a Windows 10 update,

>I lost most function key functions including wifi.

 

I created this forum account just to encourage you to trying those nano USB wifi plug, it is far from ideal but keep your machine going.

 

Currently I am using a GigaLan USB adapter to get the S7 connected, seems no speed difference from the Ethernet port on the Timeline X.

 

Good luck and good day!

 

Regards.

padgett

First use a product such as from Nirsoft to save both the BIOS key (which should be for 8.1) and the current key (for Windows 10. That way you have records of the product keys if you need them.

 

That said drivers for devices are continually being rolled out but what you describe sounds like a conflict, perhaps in IRQs (can check with MSINFO32 submenus).

 

Depending on what you are trying to do, 4gb and an i5 should be able to do almosta anything including Windows 64, I rarely go over 2gb on my machines (sitting on 1.9gb right now: Windows 10-64 Anniversary).

 

Now have all machines (except one ea XP desktop & laptop) running Anniversary including three tabs with 2GB ram & 32GB SSDs. Those were fun. Auchient Aspire 1 532h was a breeze in contrast but had been hotrodded a bit.

 

Point is I suspect that you have conflicting drivers and while non-trivial to correct, it  is usually a matter of installation order which requires diddling the registry.

 

Do not have an S7 to test but have one of my development machines set for dual boot, Win 7 and Win 10. Can be very handy to resolve conflicts and just requires multiple partitions.

 

I agree about the 11.6" form factor, part of the reason I bought an R3, it is nice.