Tweaking the Acer

In 2005, I bought an Acer Travelmate 4151LMi laptop (part number LX.T7606.068). It's a nice machine and more than adequate for my tasks (i.e. surfing and editing web pages, reading email, editing maths documents with LaTeX, and general word processing). The graphics subsystem (onboard Intel 915GM) is not fantastic, so I wouldn't recommend it if you are a serious gamer. Note also that the graphics system has no memory of its own and borrows 128Mb from the main memory.

To start with, I had some problems with choppy DVD playback, a good deal of noise, and generally slow performance. Ultimately, I found that the root cause was in a piece of software called Acer eRecovery, in particular, a subprogram called Monitor.exe. I disabled the software by starting regedit and editing the following key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

From this key, I removed the value name eRecoveryService which has value data C:\Windows\System32\Check.exe

Et volia! The performance suddenly shot up, the DVD playback became smooth and the noise disappeared — in fact, the laptop is very quiet. Reading the blog of Crippled Canary, it seems that the problem is due to the fact that eRecovery uses the D: partition, which must be of type FAT32. This will cause problems if you have a dual-boot system.