Windows 7 on Acer TravelMate C110

introduction

I got Acer travel mate Tablet PC. This is a great little workhorse - it has 900MHz CPU that is on par with most of the Atom's out there, so I find little reason to even consider getting a netbook.

My Acer was running Windows XP Table PC edition. I wasn't even thinking of upgrading it to Windows Vista (as it did not have enough resources), but with all the hype that Windows 7 is optimized operating systems - I was thinking - let's give it a try!

First, let's go with the setup of Acer - it has 1.25GB of memory, thereby passing a requirement for more than 1GB of RAM. It has 900MHz CPU, barely below 1GHz minimum, and I upgraded it with 80GB/5400 PATA drive that works just fine.

As you can see from "Windows Experience Index" the slowest part of the setup is graphics, but given that I don't plan to play first person shooters on it - it's just fine!

install

Acer does not have DVD drive, so I used USB key to boot Windows installation.

Check this blog post to create Windows 7 bootable USB Key.

I installed clean install of Windows 7 on the machine (I upgraded HDD before installing Windows 7, so there was no point of transfering XP over first).

Machine booted in safe graphics mode, and it was missing some of the drivers.

network

First I installed network drivers - it turns out one can install Intel 2100b drivers for XP on Windows 7. It turns out you can 'force' windows to use XP's driver. So I downloaded latest driver from Intel's site and forced Windows 7 to accept Intel drivers although it complained a lot!

This was not enough to get Windows 7 to start using networking adapter, and after some agony I remembered that friend of mine mentioned that Acer has stupidest software button that turns of wireless adapter. Linux has a app that can be used to flip the software switch, as button in itself is dead and wireless if off (remember that wireless is on only when red LED is turned on).

After trying to install most of the original Acer utilities I figured that I may need to return back to XP as Notebook Manager throws exceptions almost on any click. After a bit of frustration I noticed that 'Launch manager' althrough it does not help with the button has an option 'Wireless Device Boot Status' and it can be turned on.

This saved the day! Now networking works.

sleep & graphics

Acer is not functional, so let's see what is next issue on the list. Mysteriously Acer does not want to sleep. It just wants to hibernate or shut down. This is a bit of annoying as using XP I could just close the lid and it would sleep fine.

Another set of frustrating explorations led to the command that will list sleep states, and what prevents system from falling a sleep. Results of this command suggested that the issue is in graphics adapter that was generic VESA and as such it didn't know anything about sleeping.

It turns out that Intel didn't provide support for 855 chipset - can you blaim them? Chipset is about quite old and they would like us to buy new ones. Installing 915 drivers didn't work, but using XDDM mode of 855 drivers (produced for Vista) worked just well enough to get my machine to accept driver, and to be able to happily fall asleep.

Now finally sleep worked fine! Awesome!

not much sleep for the wary

While sleep would be really cool and I would enjoy it - it had one drawback. Remember network? And that stupid button? Well, if you sleep machine, on wake up network does not wake up.

So I just hibernate my Acer when I'm done using it.

conclusion

Windows 7 works well on Acer C110. It is an awesome little machine. Sleep does not work well, but most of the other functions are just fine. I also like how Windows 7 improved tablet functionality - hand writing recognition is way better than before.