Acer Nitro 5 such as ANS515-42: Windows 7, NVMe compatibility, and PS2 touchpad support

Jakob99
Jakob99 Member Posts: 12

Tinkerer

Hi! I was considering getting an older Acer Nitro 5, for example, the ones that come with 9th Generation Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU (like Nvidia GeForce 1xxx series) and am planning on installing Windows 7 to it. I know 7 will install as I can replace the bootmgfw.efi with Flashbootpro's custom bootmgfw.efi to get it working under UEFI mode. I know how to get rid of the unsupported processor nag, and so forth, so this is not an issue.

My issues are the following: I saw that it appears to support three drives; 1 2.5 inch SATA and two NVMe's, much like my Dell Precision 7530. I just want to verify this is the case. Also, I have a WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB and a WD_BLACK SN750 SE 1TB currently inside my Precision 7530 (both work great in there, and are picked up in Windows along with the 2.5 inch 4TB SSD). Will both of these work inside the Nitro 5? I don't want to buy a used Nitro 5 only for my NVMe's to not be compatible. I had an Aspire A315-21 until last week when I sold it, that had a second, non-SATA drive slot, but unfortunately, none of my NVMe drives worked. Not the Union brand 256GB NVMe, not the WD_BLACK SN750 SE 1TB NVMe… The drive slot, I think was fine, it's just that I was using an incompatible drive (As I stated previously, I sold this laptop and it is no longer in my possession). If you want to see the type I drive that I currently have in the Dell, here's a link to an eBay listing for WD's 2TB drive, an exact match of the one I have:

For future reference, if the drives go on sale again around the Christmas holiday, I may snag this 4TB WD NVMe drive to replace the 1TB, provided all of these will work in the laptop:

Last but not least, I've heard that these laptop's initially included an option to change the touchpad mode between I2C (Advanced) and PS2 (Basic) within the BIOS before the option was removed in a later BIOS update. Is this correct, and if so, would I be able to roll back the BIOS to regain the I2C→PS2 option in the BIOS? This is needed as the I2C touchpad will not work under 7 (as Intel dropped Win7 support starting with Kaby Lake), so by having the option to switch the touchpad operation from I2C to PS2 mode, the OS will use the Basic Microsoft PS/2 Mouse drivers, and allow the touchpad to work, meaning I don't have to use a USB mouse just to use Win7, like I have to do with my 7530, lol.

And don't worry, I also plan on installing Win10 as well alongside 7. This is the reason I want multiple drive slots, so each OS can have its own EFI partition (you can do this by installing Windows through the command prompt). I sincerely hope you can answer my questions here about this laptop. I also apologize for the long post, but I can't find any concrete information pertaining to my questions, so I'm hoping somebody can help me out. Thanks in advanced for your help!