Sunday, October 21, 2007

Acer C110 Upgrade Status

I installed the Samsung 160GB hard drive and the Intel 2915 wireless network adaptor which now gives me rev G wireless. Using the service manual I was able to make these upgrades easily. After installing the new hard drive I did a clean reinstall of windows XP tablet edition as well as all of the programs I use so the process took some time but overall it was quite easy.

Having rev G wireless is very nice compared to the native rev B the Acer C110 came with and the new hard drive is very quiet. The original hard drive was quite noisy mainly due to it taking a 6 mile trip on the roof of my car a few years back. It was at least in a protective case, but nothing very sturdy. Fortunately it didn't fall off the car thanks to the roof rack but I was still very surprised it actually survived. With the noisy hard drive gone and since the Acer doesn't have a fan (the Q1P does) the whole tablet is very quiet.

As for processing speed, the Acer never really seemed that slow but now with a clean install and faster hard drive (5400 v. 4200 rpm) the overall response seems faster.

With the clean install using the Acer recovery disks there were many Microsoft updates including XP SP2. However, after installing all of the updates the floating tip didn't appear. That was easily resolved by downloading the program floatingtip.exe. Also, specific to the Acer C110, I downloaded and installed a utility (wchange) that allows you to turn on and off the wireless card. This is nice to have when in tablet mode as the hardware button is hidden. I also changed the drive format from FAT to NTFS. This was easily done using this guide.

Improvements I would still like to make are to battery life and screen quality. The battery life ranges from 1.5 hours to 2 hours depending on screen brightness and power status of the wireless card. The screen quality really pales compared to the Q1P. Not sure if there is anything I can do about the screen quality but I have some ideas about battery life. I'll keep you posted.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

There are several steps you can take to help you get maximum performance from your laptop battery: Prevent Memory Effect - Keep the laptop battery healthy by fully charging and then fully discharging it at least once every two to three weeks.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this outstanding article.I thought Centrino was the best technology for laptop battery performance.

Anonymous said...

sir,i love your blog.as your blog is very well.you give expression to your literary grace

Anonymous said...

A good read!I have found using higher capacity batteries is a good way to go, that way you dont have to comprimise your laptops performance.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

thanks,Other small improvements in battery life may be gained by the ability to turn off USB ports individually to save power.

Anonymous said...

I recompiled the kernel with “device ehci” disabled and it works :D . Pressing the power button will toshiba a50 battery,toshiba a55 battery power of my laptop as aspected! My sound works with snd_hda module. Soon i will try to install the wireless card driver(i don’t need it right now).
toshiba a80 battery,toshiba pa3356u battery,toshiba pa3383u battery,toshiba p30 battery What is “device ehci” for? Can toshiba pa3420u battery,toshiba pa3420u battery,toshiba pa3451u battery,toshiba m70 battery i use my usb port as usual?
Is there a way to make the CardReader works in freebsd?
Did you made some fine tunnig with sysctl or something else!

Anonymous said...

My friend and I were recently talking about technology, and how integrated it has become to our daily lives. Reading this post makes me think back to that discussion we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.


I don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as memory gets cheaper, the possibility of transferring our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about every once in a while.


(Posted on Nintendo DS running [url=http://www.leetboss.com/video-games/r4i-r4-sdhc-nintendo-ds]R4i[/url] DS scPost)