Old Acer Laptop-How to revert to original OperSystem
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Thread: Old Acer Laptop-How to revert to original OperSystem

  1. #1
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    Old Acer Laptop-How to revert to original OperSystem

    Attempting to help a friend. His laptop (older) has been acting up with warnings of low disk space and Windows warnings.

    It seems that his ex-brother in law upgraded his laptop with a not so legit version of Windows 7 Pro. This way done quite some time ago.

    I have attached some relevant (photos) info which may assist you.

    The biggest issue is he is almost out of space on his hard drive. I am moving many photos he has to a flash drive to help clear up some room on the hard drive.

    I advised him that the best thing to do is to revert back to the original system setup (factory default) which will help give him more hard drive storage (C Drive) and assist his system in being more stable. I am aware of the fact that MSoft no longer puts out Windows updates for Vista which is his original version.

    Acer website does not even recognize his serial number because the laptop is so old (around 2008). I wanted to see in Acer "Support" if they still have the downloads for the original Windows Vista packaged with this laptop. I looked to see if there was a partition with a recovery but from what I can see there is none.

    Suggestions please - should I just move photos to a flash drive regaining some space on C drive or attempt to revert the laptop to factory default?

    He does not use this laptop for anything much except for photos, email and surfing the net.

    If I do decide to bring it back to factory default will Acer provide me with the disk? If so my biggest issue is that it seems that the DVD player is not functioning correctly. No matter what DVD disk (DVD-R, DVD+R etc) I put in the drive the system does not recognize it.

    Suggestions welcomed - Thanks

  2. #2
    photolady's Avatar
    photolady is offline Lifetime Friend of Site Staff
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    I would say run the program called TFC by oldtimer. It recaptured 132GB of hard drive space for me. A well known program used by many of us here.

  3. #3
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    Freeing up hard drive space is the first thing to try.

    There are Windows 7 drivers available from the link below:

    https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/conten...roduct/568?b=1

    You could try contacting Acer to see if the have a recovery disc for the laptop. No guarantees on that, though it couldn't hurt to try.

    Windows 10 might install on it - see the links below:

    https://www.tenforums.com/general-su...0-upgrade.html

    https://community.acer.com/en/discus...one-how-to-fix

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-updat...and-is-it-safe

    Unfortunately, you would need a valid Windows 7 license to upgrade. Without that, you would have to pay for a license, and that might cost more than a new laptop with better specs and Windows 10 included.

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    Thanks photolady I will give TFC a spin and see what it recaptures in the way of hard drive space.

    jdc2000: Yes, I was going to contact Acer and see if a recovery disk was available for this laptop. I agree the chances are little but could get lucky - and figured purchasing a full version of Win 7 is not something he would want to do fiancially. With what my friend uses this system for I don't think he really needs Win7 Pro. I think it will just take up more hard drive space and slow his system down. Although MSoft no longer puts out Windows Updates for Vista I think bringing the laptop back to Vista would be a better idea and then he should just make sure he runs his antivirus on a regular basis. At this point I don't even see that he has an antivirus on his laptop. Oups. I normally use AVG "Free Edition".

    Moving his photos to a flash drive freed up some space on the hard drive but he has photos scattered all over his hard drive. Some are as far deep in folders as "photos">"new folder">"my pictures">"new folder">"new folder">"Pics" etc. I guess whenever he added photos to the laptop he had no idea where to place them and just dropped them anywhere he could not knowing how to navigate the folders and creating new folders as he went. I tried doing a search on all images on the laptop and then on the flash drive to see if I moved all the images to the flash drive before deleting them off the laptop but it is not so easy as I said he has them all over the place and some are duplicated in other folders.

    Urgh!! Going to take time to clean this mess up.

    One more thing I meant to ask. It has been awhile since I worked on computers and have not followed things very much and forgot a lot. I do recall that there is a registry restore point that you can set prior to making any software changes so if something goes wrong you can reset to the prior to the change with the registry. sorry, don't remember exactly what it is called. Should I do this before attempting to bring it back to Win Vista or even running TFC?

    Thanks for the suggestions
    Last edited by question2012; December 15th, 2019 at 06:52 AM.

  5. #5
    photolady's Avatar
    photolady is offline Lifetime Friend of Site Staff
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    Try this program and see if it finds all his photos. It's called PhotoRec and very reliable. Myself and my photography friends use it.

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    Rather than trying to rely on a restore point, which may or may not work if something goes wrong, I would make a full disk image of the drive so it can be restored and you can try again.

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    photolady:
    First off thanks for the suggestion to run TFC - it recouped about 65 Gigs of space. Much better than the 600 Megs. That should make him happy.
    Second - I had already started to move photos from the hard drive to the flash drive and deleting photos from the hard drive as I went along (this was prior to running TFC) so I can't run PhotoRec now I would assume. So I am now good on hard drive space. No more low space warnings every couple of seconds.

    jdc2000: Thanks for the suggestions. I think at this moment I will leave the present version of Windows 7Pro on the system. I am still getting the warnings of not a genuine version but what the heck. My concern is that the DVD is not functioning correctly and I would hate to remove Windows 7Pro and not be able to load anything on with the DVD failing. Also the touchpad mouse it acting up and you can see how warn it is and more than likely a mechanical issue involved. I think right now for what he uses the system for leaving it at Win7Pro would be best now. He will have the deal with the warning messages here and there.

    Thanks again to the two of you for your help. Very much appreciated. I think I will put this project to rest now because he has another laptop he just gave me to work on - really?!

  8. #8
    photolady's Avatar
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    PhotoRec only recovers photos, not files.

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