Yesterday was my first time to try Windows Vista — and I instantly hated it. I wouldn’t have bothered so much, since all I use my computer for is office work, e-mailing and going online. But when I compared Vista’s performance against my five years older Windows XP system, the results brought me to the conclusion that there was no choice but to get rid of Vista. Compared to XP, Vista used about three times as much system memory — in idle state! This is especially harmful to a small laptop like the Acer Aspire 2920, since higher hardware demands of the operating system mean you will run out of battery power much quicker. Also, your hardware needs more cooling — and, as a matter of fact, may potentially not last as long as it normally would.

I therefore decided to install Windows XP again, since this is the operating system I’m most comfortable with. Linux would be an equally viable choice — but with a high reluctance on Acer’s side to even provide the propper XP drivers for the Aspire 2920 for the European and American markets, I don’t have any illusions about the amount of work required to find Linux drivers for a relatively new piece of hardware. Fortunately, thanks to a number of helpful websites, setting up Windows XP on an Aspire 2920 is something a person with average computer skills will be able to accomplish.

First of all, before doing anything else, create a backup of the Acer’s hard drive — that is, use some type of imaging software, like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, to create an image of the system’s primary partition (C:\). This is not mandatory for the rest of the tutorial to work. It is just a measure of security, so you can revert back to your old system, in case anything does not go the way we intended.

The first thing you will notice when booting up from your old Windows XP Setup CD is that XP Setup won’t be able to find your laptop’s hard disk drive. At the screen where you would normally partition your hard drive, you will only see a message saying “There is no disk in this drive” and pressing buttons will result in a Blue Screen. This is due to the fact that the Acer’s HDD is a SATA hard disk — a format introduced after the release of Windows XP. XP is hence unable to handle the hard disk without the appropriate drivers. This is what we’re trying to solve.

First of all, download nLite. This is an application that lets you apply changes to your Windows XP setup disc. The version used in this tutorial is v1.4.6. Please note that nLite requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework (at least version 2.0) and read/write access to its installation folder to work, so make sure you’re either running Windows in Admin mode or change the folder rights respectively.

Now it gets a little tricky. The second thing we need is the “Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager” — i.e. the drivers for Windows XP to access the SATA HDD in your Aspire notebook. The first option would be to download the “AHCI_Intel ICH8-M_v.7.6.0.1011.zip” from Acer’s Chinese website, open the zip archive and follow the instructions under step 5.3 to extract the necessary files from the setup executables. This is a little complicated, though, and brings us to option number two: Head over to a website called The Soulpass Project and download the “slipstream drivers“. The Soulpass Project offers a tutorial similar to this one here on the Aspire 5315. The Aspire 5315 is also a product of Acer’s new Gemstone concept line and pretty much the ‘bigger brother’ of the 2920Z. They both share a similar hardware architecture, so the method used by the Soulpass Project to get XP to recognize the SATA HDD works for the Aspire 2920 as well. Download their “slipstream_drivers.zip” and extract it to a temporary folger, e.g. “C:\TEMP\slipstream_drivers”. This saves you the trouble of digging up the necessary files yourself. Kudos to Daniel Upshaw for his excellent tutorial.

Step 1: Prepare your Setup Disc

1. Insert your Windows XP SP2 setup disc and run nLite, click next.
2. Click “Browse” and select the drive you put your Windows XP disc in. A message will come up, prompting you to choose the destination folder for the files to be cached at. Cache the files at another temporary subfolder, e.g. “C:\TEMP\winxpcd_cache”.
3. Now start copying the files. When this is done, click next twice to skip the “Presets” screen.
4. At the next screen, select the “Drivers” button and the “Bootable ISO” button, then click next again.
5. When you arrive at the “Drivers” screen, select “Insert” and choose “Multiple Drivers Folder”. Give nLite the folder you extracted the “slipstream_drivers.zip” to (“C:\TEMP\slipstream_drivers” in our example above).
6. At the “Select multiple drivers to integrate” screen, click “All” in the lower left corner and go ahead. On the next screen, choose “Textmode driver” and select the whole list (hold CTRL and select all items), then click OK. Back at the “Drivers” screen click next.
7. Head forward to the next page and tell nLite to apply the changes. Click next when the process is complete.
8. At the final screen, select “Direct Burn” mode, assign a relatively low burn speed and check “Verify” to check your new XP setup disc after the job is completed. I suggest using a CD-RW, just in case you made a mistake somewhere during the last steps or anything goes wrong while writing the CD, but this is not mandatory. Now hit “Burn” and wait for your disc to finish.
9. Congratulations, you just slipstreamed the new SATA driver to your Windows XP Setup CD!

Step 2: Install Windows XP

1. Insert your new XP Setup disc and boot up your computer. Make sure your computer is actually booting from CD first and not from the HDD. This is generally the case for all Acer Aspire notebooks. If not, you may need to change your BIOS settings.
2. Installing Windows is pretty much business as usual. When prompted to choose the partition to install Windows to, you will notice that the Aspire has a hidden “PCSERVICE” partition of 10 GB, which very probably contains Acer Service tools to restore your system. It’s up to you to delete this partition. If you created an image of your primary partition before, it’s probably safe to delete this partition along with the others and do a clean reinstall. But you have to decide for yourself.
3. After the installation is complete, Windows XP will boot up and you’re back in business.

This is where the real trouble starts. Unfortunately, Acer don’t offer Windows XP drivers for the Aspire 2920 on their international and their European websites. Acer Europe replied to an inquiry about this issue saying that during their tests Windows XP caused system instabilities and wasn’t compatible with the hardware. Taking into account that Acer provides Windows XP drivers for the Aspire 2920 on their Asian websites and sells it with a Linux operating system on Indian markets, this statement certainly does not represent the whole truth.

Step 1: Downloading the appropriate XP drivers

Thankfully, there are ways to get around this problem. Acer’s Panam website, for example, offers a number of drivers for the Aspire 2920. Select “Notebooks” from the left box, then choose “Aspire 2920″ and go through the list of drivers on your right. Check each file’s details in the box below and download all drivers that are compatible with Windows XP. Apart from that, drivers are available on Acer’s Chinese and Taiwanese websites — Komku.Blogspot.com provides direct links to the files. The issue here is that these drivers may be in Chinese only — which could cause problems if you encounter a driver-related error at some point, with an error message coming up in Chinese. This hasn’t happened to me, though, and I assume that there won’t be too many problems of this kind.

Your last option would be to go through the hardware parts one by one and check the vendor’s websites for drivers. Please take into account that the Acer 2920 contains different hardware parts in different markets and each model differs slightly. Many people reported problems when trying to get the webcam to work, for instance, for which there are three different drivers on Acer’s Taiwanese website alone.

In the light of all these difficulties, I can only give a rough recommendation on the best order of installing each hardware component. Following each item, I’ll provide the name of the component built into my Aspire 2920Z model in brackets. However, make make sure you pin down the correct drivers for your laptop yourself.

Different models contain different hardware. Certain Aspire 2920 models come equipped with card readers and bluetooth connectivity. If you have trouble getting Windows to recognize these hardware parts, make sure you “activate” them — i.e., put a memory card into your card reader or turn Bluetooth on via the quick launch button. As for the webcam, I was having the same problems like most people who downgraded their Aspire to Windows XP: none of the drivers provided on the abovementioned websites seemed to be installing correctly and the “webcam utility” was missing. I was surprised to discover that the Suyin driver did in fact install correctly, the shortcut to the webcam utility was just missing. It can be found in the “Suyin NB Cam” folder in “C:\WINDOWS\”.

Last thing on the list are the Acer Empowering Add-ons (e.g., the Acer Empowering Framework, Acer ePower and so on) which had been installed with Windows Vista. These applications perform various tasks, the most important of which is an advanced power management to increase your laptop’s performance and uptime when running on battery. Unfortunately, there are no Windows XP versions of these add-ons for the Aspire 2920. A detailed post on Komku.Blogpot.com explains the possibility of using versions of the Empowering software designed for other Aspire models. I have to admit that I’m reluctant to try this out, though, since power management involves adjustments of the CPU’s clock speed and management of the hardware’s power consumption and cooling. This has to be adjusted for each computer system separately, so I’m not convinced that using software designed for a different system is as riskless an option as it seems.

Update (2008/07/01): I’ve found a very annoying problem with Acer Panam’s Suyin Webcam driver v5.8.30.500. The installer creates a new folder with a very long name in your start menu, which cannot be deleted or renamed through the normal Winows API. Trying to do so will produce the well-known “Error Deleting File or Folder – Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk” error. This is a Windows bug, which is caused by a non-character-symbol at the end of a file or a folder name. More information on this issue can be found on this blog here. Take the following steps to rename or delete the affected folder: Open your start menu and move the “Uninstall” link from the webcam folder over to a new folder. Now click “Start”, followed by “Run” and type ‘cmd’ to open a command prompt. Now enter ‘rd “\\?\C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Acer Crystal Eye Webcam Video Class Camera “‘. This should do the job.

I hope this lengthy tutorial was useful to you, despite the many problems downgrading to Windows XP can involve. A future improvement of the XP setup process would be to integrate the drivers with the Windows Setup disc directly. This is in most cases not as easy as it looks, however, so I decided to set up things manually and create another Norton Ghost image when everything is done. Please note that I cannot take responsibility for damages to your notebook that are resulting from changes to its hard- or software. Everything you’re doing, you’re doing at your own risk. Good luck and enjoy your new Aspire 2920 with Windows XP!

I was recently able to obtain a copy of a Windows XP Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI), which is a software that lets you change your operating system’s default interface language. This comes in quite handy if you need to adjust to the needs of certain users of your operating system — and it’s also very useful if you’re studying an East Asian language like Chinese or Japanese, since modern computer terms are something you usually won’t find in dictionaries.

Installation and Operation

An MUI for Windows XP contains around 4-5 CDs, each of which with a different set of languages. After inserting a disc, you are prompted to chose the language(s) you wish to install. After this is done, you need to reboot. The Regional and Language Options will now contain a new option to change your system’s default interface language (separately for each user account). Back in the days you still needed to own a Chinese version of Windows to do this — today you just change the interface language as easily as this, without much messing around.

Unfortunately, MUI packs are not available for all languages — e.g. I wasn’t able to find a Vietnamese MUI pack for Windows XP. This gap is closed by the so-called Language Interface Packs, which work similar to MUIs, but change only about 80% of your system. Unlike MUIs, they are freely available and designed for emerging or minority language markets. They may be downloaded from Microsoft’s Download Center here.

About a year ago, I’ve been looking for an alternative to the original QQ software, the biggest chat network in China. One programme I stumbled upon was LumaQQ. But only recently, when Gaim was renamed to Pidgin, its developers have re-introduced a QQ plugin for this free and popular multi-protocol instant messenger. However, Pidgin is not the most friendly programme in terms of usability and frequently causes problems — especially for people who need to exchange messages in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. I therefore decided to give a few hints on how to make Pidgin more equipped for this type of task.

First of all, a little background information: Pidgin has been around for at least as long as Trillian, another popular multi-protocol instant messenger. The Pidgin project, however, is not “stuck” in the same way as Trillian, which has not seen a new release since 2004. Furthermore, Trillian suffers from two more issues: software bloat and commercialization. From the first “Pro” version onwards, the free version of Trillian retained only a few basic features and its users were excluded from the ability to extend their application by plugins. Both versions kept becoming more hardware demanding, although the core functionality ramained more or less unchanged. The reason many people use it anyhow, is because the original ICQ, MSN and AOL clients are no better. ICQ is bloated, MSN suffers from limited configurability and most importantly: each programme’s interface is cluttered with advertising and nonsense. Pidgin closes this gap by providing a simple, modular cross-platform chat application. At the same time, though, it creates new problems, which we will try to tackle here. So let’s get down to business.

Unicode and font issues

Assuming you have Pidgin installed, the first thing you’re going to notice will be the relatively small font which is used by default. The problem here is that you can increase the font size (Tools -> Conversation -> Font), but there is one thing Pidgin has in common with Trillian: they don’t support dynamic font switching — i.e. provided you use a font that is designed for Latin text only and you receive a message in Chinese, your chat app automatically switches to a font that can display Chinese characters. Unlike the original MSN messenger, for example, Pidgin and Trillian don’t do that. So what you will have to do is, chose a text font that can display Latin text and characters in the language you need. Recommendations are: “Sim Sun” for Simplified Chinese, “MingLiU” for Traditional Chinese, “Mincho” for Japanese, “Batang” or “Guilim” for Korean.

Unfortunately, these fonts don’t just fall from the sky. A number of fonts are installed when you install support for East Asian languages (this applies to Windows XP users only). More are included in Microsoft’s Office Proofing Tools, which among other things, also update your IMEs. The central issue here is, though, what do you do when you need more than one Non-Latin language? As for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), there are two fonts, that I know of, that can handle this task: “Batang” and “Arial Unicode MS”. As far as I remember, Batang doesn’t handle all Japanese and all Chinese characters, but it’s more widely avaiable and probably okay for the occasional user. “Arial Unicode MS“, on the other hand, looks more modern and blends in better on a Western system. To check which languages are supported by your font, copy the text below and paste it into Pidgin’s chat window:

• 汉语 (Simplified Chinese), 漢語 (Traditional Chinese), 日本語 (Japanese), カタカナ (Japanese Katakana), ひらがな (Japanese Hiragana), 한국어 (Korean)

You will notice that, no matter what you do, you will still occasionally encounter problems when using a third party-client to exchange Unicode messages. Exchanging Unicode messages tends to work between third party-clients, e.g. Pidgin-Trillian, and between the original clients, e.g. ICQ-ICQ, but every now and then you’ll run into trouble when sending a Unicode message from Pidgin to an original client. Especially Korean seems to be very persistent in this regard, but I still wasn’t able to single out a specific reason for this. Perhaps it’s related to the system codepage in some way. Trillian used to cause problems when leaving Chinese offline messages for someone on ICQ. They came out right when the user “forced” Trillian to use UTF-8 encoding, but this somehow didn’t go along too well with German umlauts for example.

Update: The unicode issue persists if the other side is using a non-unicode font. To get Pidgin to ignore font formats, open your Buddy List window and go to Tools –> Preferences –> Conversations and uncheck “Show formatting on incoming messages”.

Optimizing performance

One last thing to make the Pidgin GUI a little faster: Open your start menu, chose “Gtk+”, run the Gtk theme selector and select the “Mist” theme. This theme will demand less system resources and reduce the lag when resizing/scrolling the Pidgin interface.
And one more thing for users of Pidgin’s QQ plugin: The most recent version of Pidgin (version 2.4.2) seems to be suffering from an issue with the latest Gtk runtime — all nicknames on the QQ network and all text that is sent to other users, comes out as (NULL). This is a known issue and can be fixed by reverting back to the old Gtk framwork 2.12.1 rev b. Download and open gtk-runtime-2.12.1-rev-b.exe and chose to replace the current Gtk runtime.

To close this rather lengthy post, I would like to remind you that Pidgin is not for everybody. It will definitely require more “messing around” on the user side than MSN or even Trillian do. It still does not support MSN offline messages and so far there is no support for audio/video chat, although the developers have profited heavily from the Google summer of code, which contributed a lot to the development of these new features. This has drawn criticism from many parties and it could certainly be argued that praising oneself for accomplishments in the past while neglecting an ongoing project doubtlessly hurts the reputation of free software. The devlopers of Pidgin would do well to have a look at Adium, the official chat client for Mac OSX, which uses the Pidgin libraries but outperforms the actual Pidgin client by far. In this regard, the future of Pidgin is just as uncertain as that of, say, Trillian or other free software projects. It’s still a viable alternative for those who don’t want to submit to the “big guys” in the market.

Download Pidgin: