Acer Travelmate 8573T SSD upgrade hidden partitions PQSERVICE, ACER_IV

markyb555 · 26 Dec 2014

Hi folks,

Ive tried searching throughout the forum and on the internet and havent been very successful so far, but hopefully somone can shed some light on my issue.

My mother has a Acer Laptop 8573T which was shipped with Win7 pro. She has been experiencing some lag and has been generally jealous of my own machine on a ssd, so i thought why not buy her one for christmas!

Having spied her machine that she wasnt that much space, I opted for a Intel 530 180gb.

Having stripped it down and attempting to swap the data, ive quickly realised that Acer ship with 3 hidden partitions.

System Reserved, which i believe is a win7 boot partition and is only 100mb.. so not that big of a deal.
PQSERVICE, which i believe is something to do with the factory back up (which has been burned to dvd's) this is currently taking up 23.8gb of the 27.3 in the partition.
and ACER_IV which is currently around 1gb of the 8gb partitioned but of fat32

Now, because of these extra partitions which was hidden, Ive not filtered this into the size of the ssd capacity.

Her original hdd was/is a WD 500gb which obviously is fine space wise.

I have the Intel 520 180gb and i forgot to filter in the PQSERVICE as when I swapped hdd, I swapped from vista to win 7 Ultimate 64bit at the same time with an bought disc which would wipe PQSERVICE.. although it still doesnt have ACER_IV..

ive read mixed feelings if the PQSERVICE partition can be deleted/removed (which would be great as we already have the discs) but i was wondering what the ACER_IV partition was for?

Edit: Im now actually posting from the machine with the new ssd installed and so far boots and works fine without PQSERVICE or ACER_IV installed on the ssd. but im still curious as to what ACER_IV is?

another question.. whats the benefit of merging "system reserved" with the C:\ if any at all in my current situation?

Thank you

gregrocker · 27 Dec 2014

Does the PC still have the factory install? If so that is the worst possible install of Win7 one can have, larded with bloatware and duplicate utilities which interfere with better versions built into Win7. That's why most tech enthusiasts won't even run such an install but instead Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

Everything needed is in the blue link to get and keep a perfect install just like a million others have done without a single complaint.

Until then you can Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

gregrocker · 27 Dec 2014

Does the PC still have the factory install? If so that is the worst possible install of Win7 one can have, larded with bloatware and duplicate utilities which interfere with better versions built into Win7. That's why most tech enthusiasts won't even run such an install but instead Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

Everything needed is in the blue link to get and keep a perfect install just like a million others have done without a single complaint.

Until then you can Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

Those factory partitions wouldn't likely run after transfer anyway.

gregrocker · 27 Dec 2014

Does the PC still have the factory install? If so that is the worst possible install of Win7 one can have, larded with bloatware and duplicate utilities which interfere with better versions built into Win7. That's why most tech enthusiasts won't even run such an install but instead Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

Everything needed is in the blue link to get and keep a perfect install just like a million others have done without a single complaint.

Until then you can Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

Those factory partitions wouldn't likely run after transfer anyway.

markyb555 · 05 Jan 2015

Greg,

Thanks for the reply. It is a Acer version of Win7 which i understand isnt the best version to use but was the version I had to play with.

I did manage to migrate the OS from the mechanical drive to the new SSD with all partitions as is, (never tried them) however, It was decided not to process with the SSD installation as the boot times really wasnt that much of an significant gain from the mechanical drive believe it or not.

My own PC saw a massive improvement in everyway with the Intel 520 180gb version but my mothers (Acer Travelmate as above) did improve, but definately not worth £100 for the sake of 10 seconds longer boot up times. plus not being a tech herself she wasnt too keen on the idea of having a smaller HDD then previous (even if she does has a external usb HDD to storage music,documents etc on :\ )

Thanks for your help

gregrocker · 05 Jan 2015

Have you tried to Clean Up Factory Bloatware?

This can enormously speed up boot times as well as give much better performance, but not as good as a Clean Reinstall Windows 7

Also check your SSD Alignment and other SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7