This could possibly fit better in a support forum, but I reckon the Lounge gets enough relevant traffic. Please move this thread if there's a better forum for it. I just installed Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit (clean install after wiping Vista HP 32bit) on my laptop and I'm experiencing problems/weird issues with a number of things: 1) the most obvious: the HDD activity led stays on after windows starts up, intermittently while operating and also when shutting down. The disk itself doesn't appear to be actively read/written to during this. While the LED is lit (for minutes at times), attempting to do anything remotely useful (such as running a program) will result in a stall (the progam becomes non-responsive). 2) windows won't shut down, but rather freezes at the log off screen, forcing me to kill it the hard way (eg hold down the power button). The longest I've waited is ~5 minutes, which IMO should be enough. The HD LED remains on. 3) I'm having a ton of trouble with the DVD drive: half of the time it has trouble spinning up properly and it's almost impossible to install anything from it because when it spins down (and it will spin down quite quickly) it simply won't spin up again. If I then try and browse the disk or what not, it just says it's discovering items, but won't spin up, effectively hanging Explorer (and any running installer currently running from the disk). My best bet is to not allow the drive to spin down and either rip or copy needed stuff to the hard drive for installation - which is just plain stupid. This did not use to happen before I upgraded - in its current state the entire OS is more of a joke. The drive is a Toshiba according to BIOS and Toshiba's webpage says it should run on generic drivers from Win95 up. Go figure. I do realize this could (or rather should) be a case of missing/wrong drivers - so far I've installed motherboard drivers (which I'm 99% sure are the correct ones) and video card drivers (which I know are correct). I've compared my jotted down list from what I had in Vista and to what I have now in 7 and I can't notice any real differences. Any ideas what might be causing this/what I might do to help identify the problem? These HDD wait phases and the shutdown/restart hang-up are more than annoying. edit: holy jumping hearbeat @ typos and freudian slips! [Edited by - irreversible on March 23, 2010 12:52:46 PM]

Have you tried updating your BIOS? I also had trouble installing Windows Vista 64-bit; it would keep BSOD'ing on every startup until I updated my 3-year old BIOS.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
1) the most obvious: the HDD activity led stays on after windows starts up, intermittently while operating and also when shutting down. The disk itself doesn't appear to be actively read/written to during this.

Sure about that? Pull up Task Manager and enable the I/O Reads and I/O Writes columns, and see if anything's steadily increasing.

Quote: 2) windows won't shut down, but rather freezes at the log off screen, forcing me to kill it the hard way (eg hold down the power button). The longest I've waited is ~5 minutes, which IMO should be enough. The HD LED remains on.

Hm... ACPI thing? Try playing with the ACPI settings in your BIOS setup.

All three of your issues could kinda possibly maybe be explained by an IDE controller problem, so I suppose you should take a look at that. Try changing the driver over to a generic IDE controller driver and see what happens.

These are obviously not problems with 64bit. Neither with Win7 since it don't react like this usually. Update the BIOS first, then be sure you have every Windows Updates applied (even if it shouldn't react like this stock). The problem is probably the driver handling the IDE/Sata controllers on your motherboard. This is probably the Intel chipset driver. I wouldn't be surprised if HP don't even ship the correct ones.

Where did you find your drivers? In Windows7, 99% of drivers appear in "optional updates" under Windows Update now. Or you could use HP Updates, but I personally hate HP softwares, it's bloated and always fail.

To clarify - HP in my post stands for Home Premium, not Hewlett-Packard! :) I own an Acer Aspire 5739.

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll update the BIOS first. The motherboard drivers come in one set for Intel boards and I got them from Intel's site based on what model was identified by Intel's own utility.

Opps sorry I kept the idea in my mind you used HP hardware :).

To keep everyone on their tiptoe - as I'm sure everyone is -, I can report that after flashing the BIOS, but prior to installing AHCI drivers, while windows was running and trying to read something from a DVD, the CD/DVD drive decided to leave. And by leave I mean - the drive letter, in a very elegant way, disappeared from Explorer and upon restarting the computer, also from BIOS. Oddly enough, something that I would consider as potentially being the DVD drive shows up under Disk drives in Device manager. Naturally, Acer does not provide separate drivers for the CD/DVD-ROM, so I'll try and update the chipset drivers again.

This is so cool - last time I had this much fun was in 1996, installing Windows 95.

Google shows a lot of compatibility issues with that laptop series.

You might find this link useful: fix dvd not detected in Windows 7 on Acer Aspire

They have a bunch of other Acer Aspire compatability issues on there, too.

And here's the climactic resolution: an outdated iLok (Interlok) driver was raping the BIOS, which had to be flashed again.

And it turns out there's a huge difference between "Intel ICH9-E/M SATA AHCI Controller" (installed by default) and "Intel ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller" (correct driver).

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Yeah Win 7 is a failed OS if I ever saw one! Forcing you to install correct drivers for your hardware and everything. Whenever I boot up the sucker, I feel like Bill must've felt during that legendary Win95 printer driver demo, dreading the BSOD. On linux, The Blue Screen of Death only comes up once in a while, and that's because I set it as my screensaver! LOL