Acer laptop woes

LucyBliss

I have an Acer Extensa 5620Z since 2009. But for the past few months, it's giving me trouble. It has to be constantly plugged in as the battery power is down to a few minutes. It recognises the printer but when I click 'print', the documents stay pending. The DVD/CD player stopped working and when I investigated, it told me that there was a driver missing. Where it went, I don't know and I wasn't able to find anything helpful on the Acer website.

Worst of all though, on a 32 GB C drive, I am down to 700 MB, sometimes less until it tells me to delete such and such temp files to get extra space but it's always only temporary. The laptop is not filled with pictures or music and I have the essential programs that I need. I moved as much as I could to an external hard drive (which isn't working either at the moment, just to complicate things further). As technically proficient as I've become over the years dealing with laptops and printers, this is just over my head.

I'd appreciate a bit of feedback as to what people think is wrong and if I can possibly solve this myself. If not, can anyone recommend somewhere in Galway that I could leave both the laptop and external hard drive to to see if they can be fixed?

Alanstrainor

32GB C drive is simply not enough. Best be would be to back up all your stuff (pictures/movies/music etc) and reformat the drive and install windows again. 32GB for windows 7 simply is not workable at all.

Torqay

Alanstrainor wrote: »

32GB C drive is simply not enough.

This can only work if you move the usual storage folders (desktop, docs, pics, music, videos, etc.) to another partition/drive.

And if you have lots of software installed, change the default installation path.

LucyBliss

Alanstrainor wrote: »

32GB C drive is simply not enough. Best be would be to back up all your stuff (pictures/movies/music etc) and reformat the drive and install windows again. 32GB for windows 7 simply is not workable at all.

This is running on Windows Vista, if that makes any difference. And I have a Data D drive that currently has 27.9GB free of 32.3GB.

All my pictures/movies/music are on an external hard drive so that wouldn't be a problem. The thing is I have moved a lot of programs off the C drive and onto the external hard drive or I've simply deleted them if I wasn't using them enough.
But if I were to reformat the drive and install windows, how would I go about that?

Sorry if that's a stupid question but I'm loathe to do anything to this laptop if I don't fully understand what it is I'm doing or how to do it!

Torqay

Sounds like an 80 GB HDD to me. Do you have the Vista installation DVD?

LucyBliss

Torqay wrote: »

Sounds like an 80 GB HDD to me. Do you have the Vista installation DVD?

I don't remember there being one - I do remember being surprised that I didn't have a bunch of installation disks, remembering what it was like when I bought my PC, and I turned the thing on and it did its set up thing. But I did buy it in 2009 so I may be mistaken and there could be one around somewhere.

Problem is though, the DVD/CD drive is giving me guff too and won't recognise discs owing to a driver disappearing. I don't know how that happened as I never went messing about the parts of it I didn't anything about.

Torqay

Well, well, well...

Of course, you can create a bootable USB stick from your Vista installation DVD. Or use the recovery facility (ALT + F10 at the POST screen) but make sure everything important has been backed up as this will restore the laptop to its factory default settings and everything on the drive will be overwritten.

If you don't have the disk and the recovery solution doesn't work and you fancy some little adventure, grab some Linux distro (e.g. Mint or Ubuntu) and make the switch. Of course they can be installed from a USB stick too.

Alanstrainor

Torqay wrote: »

This can only work if you move the usual storage folders (desktop, docs, pics, music, videos, etc.) to another partition/drive.

And if you have lots of software installed, change the default installation path.

Again, this simply wont be enough to run Vista, or 7, unless you want to be really proactive with how you clean and maintain your drive, it's just not worth the hassle. Updates will soon fill that space.

Also, OP, I would forget installing linux, if you're not reasonably techy then it's just not a good idea.

Best bet is to reinstall vista, which can be done via usb stick if needs be.

Torqay

Ahh, 32 GB isn't really too bad for Vista or 7.

Once had windows 7 running on a 4 GB SSD, so I know a thing or two about of being proactive...