Have an Acer Aspire 1 notebook running Win7 starter, which only really gets used in the car. And not often. Used it the other day where it initially spent ages updating everything.
It's now stuck on what appears to be minimum screen 'brightness'. I'd set up my own power saving settings which worked ok - but even going back to the defaults makes no difference. The slider at the bottom of the power options page on the control panel is at minimum an can't be moved.
Is it being used for any actual proprietary diagnostic software (presumably for the BMW - which is pre-OBD, isn't it?), or just for browsing/PDF manuals?
If the latter, then why d'you need something so heavy as Win7? Lightweight linux distro.
Any modern OS used on t'internet at all is going to want updating frequently - and it's always a good idea - but the lighter and the less installed, the better.
In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes
I haven't used the starter edition, but presumably it has system restore so you could go back to the 'pre-update' point and see if that fixes it?
How bright is the "BIOS" screen? Does it only go dim once you boot into Windows?
If it's nice and bright while booting but goes dim once Windows is running, it's a software problem and should be a process of elimination. Seems most likely after a "mass" updating of drivers and stuff.
Can you (in Windows) adjust the brightness with whatever key combo turns it up and down - on my Sony laptop you hold the FN key and press "F6" for up and "F7" for down, yours might be FN plus arrow keys. My F5 and F6 keys have a little icon of a sun with a plus and minus sign. Might also be worth checking you or the laptop haven't set it up to display on an external monitor.
Mainly TunerStudio and associated MegaSquirt software. But I do also use it for general things while away.
And this would fix my problem in what way? ;-)
Ah, OK. You've got the SD1 on 'squirt?
I was just thinking nobody has even made a suggestion. How about what video hardware does it have? Nvidia? I had a lot of trouble with a laptop running this after nvidia helpfully updated the driver and it would not work right untill I moved it back to the old driver. Probably not the same issue but Laptops can be real pain if they use tweaked drivers and the updating goes wrong. Brian
Thanks Brian - I've not knowingly updated the driver, but I'll check.
Yup - and EDIS. For about 5 years now.
hard to find a lightweight one these days. Or one that really likes ruinning a decenmt browser and anything else in under 1MB RAM./
I do it, but sometimes I wonder why I bother. The new stuff is not markedly better than the old
it would probably have drivers that actually worked with the hardware..
I bet the update has broken some custom acer hardware. You probably need to go to acer and get latest drivers AS WELL etc.
Well I did, but... *shrug*
Got it with me now, and no. Stays the same level.
It's FN and arrow left and right - had to look it up. That does work. Before, I'd simply set things on the power page of the control panel, and those no longer have any effect. Nor does it now dim when on battery after the set time as I'd left things. So it looks like something has changed in the Windows software. Not to worry - I can now use it as is, thanks.
Most likely when you did the updating, a new driver was installed (probably graphics) and has messed something up. Now all you have to do is find it :)
If it is the driver you should be able to go into it from Device Manager and "Roll back" the driver.
1GB, presumably :-) Back in the day (but this was pre-web) I think you could boot a custom system in a couple of MB, although 4MB was the minimum for SLS (and make that 8MB if you wanted X running on top).
Are there any decent browsers these days? Everything I'm aware of is bloated and buggy as hell :-(
cheers
Jules
Firefox chews 250Mbytes per instance. Flash takes a lot of CPU to drive a screen.
The problem is not the distro, its the apps.
Firefox and T'bird together take 400Mybtes on my system
F600/T300Mb on a modern Mac.
Rob
F=661, T=223 - but suspect that if anything else put a squeeze on memory, those numbers could drop a bit. As it is, that is pretty much all that is actively running on a 64-bit W7 lappie with 8GB. So no reason for it to have its memory usage trimmed.
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