Tag: windows

Windows 7 on Acer E1-530

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.

Visual Studio 2013 hangs after each debug session

Stumbled upon this issue when Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 would hang after each debug session. Very annoying especially when you want to quickly run the application test something, fix code and back to the beginning of this cycle. The hanging would occur for about 15-30s every time I would close the application and debug session ends. To resolve this I tried a lot of solutions suggested by Google which didn’t help:

  • Resetting Visual Studio 2013 settings via “devenv.exe /ResetSettings”
  • Deleted *.suo file
  • Rebuilt new solution file with all projects
  • Even disabled internet as I was suspecting some sort of network communication issue was causing this
  • Attempted to disable git integration with Visual Studio by renaming .git folder to _git as a temporary solution
  • Tried to disable IntelliSense with no luck

The only solution that worked for me was to disable Visual Studio host process for the project. To do this on the Project menu, click Properties, then click the Debug tab and uncheck the Enable the Visual Studio hosting process check box.

Hope this post saves a few hours messing around with settings for somebody trying to resolve this issue.