Vista was current when I bought it but I wanted XP to use with some other stuff.
Now XP is well out of support and I wanted another machine to run some fairly undemanding applications but XP wasn't really usable.
I could have bought another machine but I would have really wanted a machine with an SSD and this was going to be many hundreds of pounds.
So....
Looking at e-bay, I could buy a (spinning disk) HD for about £10 and some sort of "recycled" Windows 7 licence for a few pounds and that looked OK, but would the hardware all work ?
Fitting the hard disk was a doddle. The bottom panel comes off easily for service (unlike the newer machines) and it was the work of minutes to put the new SSD in.
The licence came with a link to download the required ISO for an install disk and I burnt that to a DVD.
A fiddle in the BIOS to get the boot sequence to start off DVD and it all booted to the install DVD.
That did it's stuff for a couple of hours and Windows 7 32 bit was running OK on the laptop. Not what one might call "zippy" but OK.
The laptop has 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard disk.
I triggered windows update and it found 190 ish to do.
I left it to it.
Also the Internet Explorer wanted an update but was so old it didn't seem to want to download a new version.
It would install Chrome so I did that, then downloaded a newer IE using Chrome.
Finally I had a working computer but two devices that were not recognised.
The WiFi is fine (except that the physical switch state isn't remembered over a reboot so WiFi always starts "on") but I wanted the two devices to have drivers.
The first device which talked about "communications" was an infrared device which Windows found a driver for itself after having a try online.
The mass storage device driver couldn't be found.
A good Googling got me to an Acer driver site (as well as a number of other dodgy sites !)
That had a card reader driver which sorted the final mystery device and also a driver for infrared which I didn't try (as this was fixed and I've never used it).
So Acer Extensa 5220 working fine (if a bit slowly) on Windows 7. It is a "mains laptop" as the battery seems poorly but for a limited application usable and saved from the electrical recycling for a few years.
