Windows XP forum: SM Bus Controller - Acer Aspire M5100

"SOL" is a pretty poor technical response, and rather unkind to boot. Perhaps no reply would be better than an uninformed opinion.

It took some seriously informed detective work, but I (and many others) have Win XP Pro up on my Acer Aspire 4315-2590 and working nicely. A place to start would be the XP drivers for slightly earlier Acer Aspire models such as the 2480. Before the machine will even let you wipe the drive ou will need to go into the BIOS and flip the drive interface from AHCP to IDE.

The "SM Controller" driver services the motherboard "Southbridge," a fancy term for the chip that oversees I/O processes. Google "ATI Catalyst" for SM Bus Controller Driver. Download the You will need to install .NET 3.0 before you install the ATI package.

The Acer Aspire 4315-2490 is built around a Processor and motherboard that has been proven with Windows XP for at least the last several years. It only makes sense that the mobo chip manufacturers would have XP drivers floating around.

The talk on the notebook forums is that the 4315-2490 being labeled "Made for Windows Vista" forced Acer into an agreement that they would not publish XP drivers for the machine. That does not necessarily mean that XP drivers aren't available out there. As far as I know, there is no "Acer proprietary" hardware on the mother board.

It's not my job to do research for someone else. They should have thought about these things beforehand, and now they're paying the price. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and let people make painful mistakes. If you don't, they never learn why it's a bad idea.

Besides, I expect nothing from others that I don't expect from myself.

You sir shouldn't have said anything, because nothing you said was helpful. And you really need to learn how to spell. I counted over 40 spelling mistakes. I know, not grammatical class, but, if you're going to preach about "smarts" you'd better be darn smart yourself. There are XP drivers. You need to goto the amd.com website and download the chipset drivers there. was that so hard?

Do a google search on SMBUS CONTROLLER INTEL and you will be pointed to a Cdhip ID utility and then a ChipSet Installationutility. The latter will resolve the problem permanently. Good luck.