My wife’s Acer E1-530 is a nice laptop which comes with Windows 8 – rather a big misunderstanding by Microsoft of how proper OS should work. Windows 8 is OK for tablets, but it’s absolute rubbish for laptops without touchscreen. For no reason whatsoever I had to completely reinstall it twice, because after some time it failed to boot due to some mysterious error. The only option was to reset it which fixed it for a few weeks. After the boot problem happened for the third time it was time to load Windows 7 on the laptop.
The process is fairly simple, you just need to go to BIOS (keep pressing F2 during boot screen) and enable legacy boot mode instead of UEFI. Acer does not provide Windows 7 drivers on their website for download, but all drivers are in the C:\OEM\Preload\Autorun\DRV hidden folder. Just stumbled on this blog post which turned out to be very handy by providing the tip on where to find drivers for the Acer E1-530! The only missing driver is the “USB eXtensible Host Controller” which you can download from my blog:
USB_Intel_1.0.10.255_W7_April_2014
I replaced the HDD with an SSD and Windows 7 on the laptop and now it’s become a very fast and nice piece of kit.