Wow! 4200rpm drive really does s**k

Although I have always had 5400 rpm drives in my previous laptops. I didn't think the 4200rpm one would be this bad. Sure I notice that It take longer to boot in windows and games seems to take longer when loading graphics and such when I was using an X1000 on loan. It's not until I tried to run C&C General Zero Hour that the 4200rpm drive really reared it's ugly face.

Surprisingly , C&C:G:ZH really tax the hell out of a PC (be it a laptop or desktop) for a non FPS game. It not only require a good graphics card. it also require a good amount of RAM and a speedy CPU and HD.

I knew I'll more than likely see some performance issues when I installed it in my 2025 so I figure I'll start at 1024x786 and see. Loading is slow as expected but the opening graphics seems ok although there are minor stutter once in a while. What I didn't expect is that once in game, it would freeze for like 5 sec every minutes or when a new unit or graphical effect get called up in game. All I can see during those time is the HD activity light blinking like mad.

Fortunately, My 7200rpm was well on it's way to me by then and once I clone my content over. The difference is like night and day. The long pauses are gone and although there are still minot stutter when the graphical need gets intense. The game is generally very playable.

So the morale of the story is that the 4200rpm drive really s**Ks and if you can at all afford it, upgrade to at least a 5400rpm HD for any laptop.

Check the review benchmark at Tom's, the biggest performance gain happens between the 4200 and 5400 while the jump from 5400 to 7200 was not quite so dramatic.

Actually it's both. ZH tends to stuuter when you have 512MB or under but it won't freeze for 5 seconds. Since I already have 768MB in my 2025 and the fact that the HD activity light was on contantly during the freeze points me to the HD.

I'm having problem restoring the the instant on arcade partition but others have had no problem. I would suggest that you go the restore CD route and do not install SP2.

I was just given some help in restoring the Instant on Arcade, I'll try it out and let you know. I use TrueImage to clone the drive and everything works great except the Instant on arcade.

Ok, Instant on acrade is working again. If your Instant on stop working after cloning. Try just booting (go into bios and change boot sequence) with the arcade recovery CD. If you get the "target partition is not IOMP" message then use the following steps.

Go into windows/control panel/adminstrative tools, under disk management and delete the last parttion (the one that is ~94.13MB). Reboot with the arcade recovery CD and it should re-install the arcade software.

Also I don't know what size drive comes with the 2023. The 2025 comes with a 80GB so when I clone it to the 60GB with auto mode, all partition were reduced in size to fit into the 60GB. I ended up using manual mode where I get to specify how much space goes to each parttion and made sure that the Acer Data partition and the other 2 hidden partition remains the same size as on the 80GB by reducing the C: parttion.

Just to give credit where it's due. Forum member "hwfan" is the one that came up with the solutions.