Son part installed Vista on XP Acer laptop ....help!

alun4

On our ACER Aspire 5600, which is 3 years old and is Centrino duo -“Designed for Windows XP but also says Vista Capable”. My son, on a school trip, borrowed a disk from a friend and tried to load Windows Ultimate. The laptop is full. Can anyone advise how to remove the partial installation?
It will allow me into Bios. It will not recognise the “Acer Backup DVD” I created when the machine was new. The web suggests I should be able to restore factory settings by getting to the Acer logo screen and then …. < ALT> + <F10> but this brings me in a circle:
A choice between the highlighted Windows Vista and An Earlier version of windows .
If I let it proceed with Vista we get to a screen “Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 – 0% complete Do not turn off the computer the back to rhe Acer logo screen.
If I choose an earlier version of windows I get the XP screen …. Aspire welcome ….. Username logon option names. It will then load the personal settings.
Then takes a few minutes to load all their start programmes! The C and D discs were full last night but I have trashes some pictures and music and now “C” is 14.4 GB free of Total size 35GB; “D” is 4.76 GB free of 35GB.

How can I get rid of the VISTA and /or happy to go back to factory settings ? So we have a like new computer! All of their pics, music and docs are saved onto ipod or discs
Alun

culpepper

cant you do system restore?
press F8 on boot until it gives you the booting options and choose safe mode.
choose no when it says safe mode or system restore and it will take you to the system restore options.
Choose to restore to a restore point.
worth a try anyway just to get it useable again..

alun4

F8 gets me onto "Advanced Boot Options"

Choose advanced options for Microsoft windows VISTA

Safe mode etc

Enable Boot Logging
Last known cinfig
Directory Services Resore Mode
Debugging Mode
Disable automatic system start on system failure
Disable Driver Signature Enforcement

Start Windows normally

But all this is headed VISTA!

culpepper

try safe mode and go from there. its bound to say vista because its working from what it has had added to it.
it might ask for you to choose user and you should be the administrator if there is that option and it should ask boot into safe mode or go to system restore and you should choose the system restore option.

prowla

Acer are evil machines from hell.

alun4

In Safe Mode it starts to list loads of files then stops ....... waits ...... comes back to the screen Configuring ...... The says Windows is shutting down ...... Then back to the Boot Manager screen as above.

codheadling

have you got d2d enabled in the bios,also have you changed the boot order to boot fron cd/dvd first with the Acer Backup DVD already in the drive

alun4

Yes to both. I guess I will have to try Acer tomorrow but the wait after answer on 0870 will hurt!

Marty_J

badguts wrote: »

Oh because they are built on the same HAL and OSI as every other PC :rolleyes:

build quality they are a bit naff but surprisingly they work like any other PC

I think perhaps they were referring to the build quality.

codheadling

vista has overwritten your acer master boot record (MBR) the only way to access the hidden recovery partition which acer call "pqservice" is to make it active(try googling pqservice and you will see what i mean).I did the same as you on my acer 3610,installed vista,did not like it,could not get rid of it,after searching for a week or so i found this linkhttp://laptop-support.net/component/content/24.html?task=view#comment54
I just followed the instructions and the laptop rebooted into the recovery mode,there are other methods such as this onehttp://laptop-support.net/forum.html?func=view&id=218&catid=28
but they basically do the same thing,as i said it worked fine for me...hope this is some help for you

theartfullodger

Acer are evil machines from hell.

Surely "Windoze is an evil OS from hell".

Cheers!

Lodger