The previous owner of this laptop had an unregistered version of vista home and many virusrs/corrupted data. So I installed avast to remove the problems but still ran super slow. So I tried to install my copy of xp pro since I have a disc with drivers for this machine. The computer wouldn't allow me to downgrade even by booting from cd so I used the hard drive as an external in another computer and formatted to remove previous os. Now when it asks to press any key to boot from cd and I do as it says the message (checking hardware configuration) comes up for a second then disappears. The screen stays blank forever afterwards. Any ideas?
My guess is that your Acer has a sata hard drive. Windows XP needs a driver that is not on the CD to access a sata drive. Your options are to either: 1. Track down the driver, put it on a floppy disk (you still have one of those don't you?) and then press F6 when prompted at the beginning of the XP install. 2. Track down the driver then integrate it with the XP CD (nlite is a good choice for this task). 3. Enter bios setup and set the hard drive to use IDE emulation. 4. Use an OS that natively supports sata drives (Vista, Win 7, Linux). Good luck...
This laptop does NOT have floppy, but why bother with XP when you can run Win7 on it just fine? sebus