Acer aspire 5515

You might want to browse the Gateway section, there were talks about successful upgrading this CPU to a higher one.

cheers ...

I bought mine 3 and a half WEEKS ago in Anitec in Vancouver! They even had MSI Wind in stock that day. The little thing is on its second out of city trip already. So how is this news??

this one uses a standard desktop AMD AM2 socket. I should take just about any desktop AM2 cpu, however you may want to stick with a lower power version as the heatsink on this laptop definitely won't be able to handle all the heat a desktop cpu can put out.

your cpu puts out 15watt tdp. you may be able to get away with an X2 3250e. it is clocked at 1.5ghz, but it is a dual core. that I believe is a 22W processor. anything higher and it will start to overheat.

easy upgrade

the AMD 5050e works perfect in the 5515 laptop.
Im not really a computer guy but i was able to do the upgrade myself with no problems in about 15 minutes. the AMD 5050e is a 2.6 ghz dual core that operates on a low 45 watt. This means good performance with low heat. My temp runs @ 36c but have gotten it up to @ 40c while watching videos. very acceptable I believe
I got mine from newegg.com for under 65 dollars delivered. came in 3 days from ups without special shipping

the processor on this laptop is easily accessible by removing the largest bottom plate and then 2 screws on the fan and 4 on the heat sink. be sure to re-apply arctic silver or some comparable thermal conductor.
good luck

RMClock - works great with AMD base machines

cheers ...

SpeedFan, if anyone has figured out what motherboard this actually is then speed fan can become a lot more useful than just a thermal readout.

I upgraded minr to A AMD Athlon 4050e dual core. It runs great now!! The only trick is getting the socket lock bar up because there is A cross brace there.

Just got an Acer 5515 ($299 from TigerDirect shipped) and have numerous questions (even after a whole day pounding the web for info).

1) Had a heckuva time getting restore discs burnt. After about 6 failures in disc 1's verify process, I ran out and bought Memorex DVD-RWs. They worked on the first try, much better than the TDK DVD-Rs I was using at first. Was close to trying XP install without restore discs in-hand.

2) Spent a lot of time collecting drivers, tools, and web advice on making the upgrade to XP.

3) Figuring the restore discs would get me out of any tough situations, I went ahead and did something potentially stupid - owning only the XP Upgrade disc, I went ahead and changed the BIOS setting for SATA Mode (to the only other option I was given by the BIOS, "IDE Native") and then tried to install Win98. I needed to do it to run the XP upgrade, but was unsurprised when the attempt failed.

4) Restored BIOS to original settings and rebooted with restore disc 1 in the drive. Boot fails with message "NTMGR.exe" is missing. Press...restart". Changing BIOS to boot from DVD-RW drive allows booting to proceed, fires up eRecovery, allows me to select Install Language, pops up a couple of confirmation messages, and appears to begin restore with a command-line window, switches to an eRecovery window detailing progress, and then fails with an error from X:\RyTools\NAPP6.exe ("Restore failed - reason 0xa000000e. Click...restart"

I have copied the DVD-RWs to DVD-Rs (as a backup backup) and switching between types makes no difference. I am currently awaiting a download of XP full install, and am going to try the various methods of install I've found once I have the dics. Just for fun, I am trying to use the XP Upgrade Disc to format the hard drive now, and will report on how that goes.

So far, XP Upgrade disc has allowed me to delete all partitions (it found 4 of them, PQ-whatever, an unnamed 2.2 GB, and the 2 visible to Vista) and is right now running a full format to NTFS. I'm hoping a full XP disc and changing the SATA mode in the BIOS will be all it takes to get a Win install running.

Next step if all that fails will be to see if I can get an install started somehow from a USB hard drive, and after that, a trip to a thrift store to find a USB floppy. Praying not to have to do it.

More posts with more horror stories would be helpful. With that Tiger sale price, I'm betting there are a lot of us out there having issues with this unsupported nightmare of a project machine...

Addenda:

Found ptedit did not run on 5515 due to vfloppy.sys not being found. Searching for solution told me that is a Symantec (Ghost, I assume) DLL, and can be compressed automatically by Windoze if one allows that sort of thing which can cause it to be 'missing', and can be removed unintentionally by uninstalls and/or 'registry cleaners'. Search of a machine with a fairly recent Ghost (v9, though) install on a different (XP) machine failed to find the file.

<time passing>

Now the machine is done formatting and restarting after "copying files" - is looking promising. Skipped "press any key to boot from CD" prompt and the standard XP installer screen is up and running.

<time passing>

WOOHOO!! XP Installed perfectly! It sees the hard drive and the DVD-RAM drive, and the video card seems to be working fine as well. Now, on to missing drivers...

Great going ...

cheers ...