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A free Ferrari from Microsoft

  • Artikkel

Laughing Squid received a Ferrari 1000 from Microsoft for testing and blogging.
Hope the laptop works. I was able to source (with excellent support from AMD) 3 of these beauties to show off at our Virtualization Summits early next year. Unfortunately all 3 did not work with Vista. I had constant system hangs and never got a pre-RTM or RTM version of Vista to work. Oh, and there were major driver issues. Even though the systems had a sticker “Vista Capable” or so, only a few drivers came out of the box with Vista. Other drivers – for XP – downloaded from the Acer website only caused more trouble. Namely the Bluetooth and the camera driver. Neither 32–bit nor 64–bit Vista worked and all systems failed memory diagnostics of all sorts.

With all that trouble I returned the systems to the vendor. After 2 weeks or so I was told – upon request – that (according to Acer) these systems have issues with Vista and Acer could not give an ETA for an update.

This was back in November. I still have not heard back (neither from Acer nor from our vendor!) but Laughing Squid’s post sounds promising. I hope the Edelman folks checked Vista compatibility before sending out the systems. We’ve had already enough questionable publicity.

I just checked the Acer support site and there are still NO Vista drivers. Since these systems are fairly expensive I would expect the drivers and stuff would have been ready for the enterprise launch but now we are close to the consumer launch of Vista and still no drivers?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2006
    Okay - first, I'm envious of those that got the free laptops - but kudos to them for having achieved influential status. I have to echo your concern about driver support - I have a Vista Ultimate Media Centre PC I built at home for testing, and I will have to flatten it to put XP Media Centre back on it, because Vista just crashes too often, and I don't have the time to be researching why. My guess is drivers - after all, someone did test Vista and Media Centre themselves for reliability before releasing them, right? But if I'm wiping my machine to put XP on it, and I'm an early adopter, that doesn't bode well for the consumer release.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2007
    Hi Barb, of course I remember! I continue to read read your blog from time to time. Thanks for the hints. Back in the office I'll give it another shot.

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2007
    I also own a Ferrari 1000 and had the same problems with the driver for Vista. I figured it all out except the orbicam. Most of the drivers could be downloaded at the websites of the manufacturer's. Perhaps could Barb Bowman post the drivers on her slte? It would make me very happy!

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2007
    I am also looking for the orbicam drivers for Vista x64. I've contacted Acer to no avail... maybe they're waiting for the consumer launch. More annoyingly, my bluetooth is disabled. The Acer ePower software is only for XP and so I can't  turn on my integrated bluetooth adaptor (it's ACPI controlled)! These soft-keys can be very frustrating... it's at times like these I long for a simple sliding toggle switch! Those of you (Volker, Patrick, Barb) who have a working camera and/or bluetooth, would you be willing to share the software? It would make me (too) very happy!

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2007
    you can install orbicam by downloading CCD41069.exe. just search on google.

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2008
    i would like for acer or microsof to fix my orbicam i don't know if i'd us it or not  i paid for it i just want it to work