Also, an unrelated but very serious thing:
The laptop's HDD (WDC WD6400BPVT) is hard-configured to use a bad default value for APM (advanced power management). It is set to 128 (254 is max, 255 means disabled) - and this value makes the drive park its heads aggressively, with a very low inactivity timeout (just 3-4 seconds).
There is a driver/software that ships with this laptop - Dolby Advanced Audio v2 - that constantly writes the same value to the windows registry every few seconds, and windows flushes the in-memory registry to disk every 5 seconds. This combined with the above causes the drive heads to constantly park and unpark, 10x a minute. The datasheet for this drive says "Load/unload cycles: 600,000", which means that after less than 6 months of daily use, the drive's mechanism will have reached the manufacturer's expected limit (SMART will report that the drive is nearing the end of its lifetime), and will eventually experience a mechanical failure.
To know if you're affected, you can do two things. In a quiet room, let the machine be idle, and listen if there's a loud 'click' coming from the laptop every 7 seconds or so. Also, run a program that displays SMART information (like AIDA64) and note the load/unload count value. Then wait a minute without refreshing (because that resets the timer), refresh, and see if the value has increased. My home HDD says 2000 after 3 years of use, because it only parks during shutdown. This laptop, brand new, after 3 weeks of occasional use, said 30000. Not good.
To solve this, you need to change the APM setting on the HDD. The default is baked into the firmware; it can be changed, but it isn't saved, so you have to change it everytime the HDD powers on - this means during startup, and also during resume from sleep. I only found one windows program that also takes care of the sleep/hibernate part, which is
quietHDD, a graphical tool written by a person who discovered this same problem. I used windows task manager to automatically run it as administrator 'on logon of any user'; half of the time it fails to create its tray icon, but it works.
PS: Alternatively, I think you could just have the Dolby Advanced Audio v2 program not start. It acts as some sort of equalizer that supposedly interacts with the specially made built-in speakers to make them sound better. This particular version only works with the speakers and does not do anything to headphones. So if you don't use the speakers, you can turn it off. Note however that you'll still be doing aggressive head parking on the drive that hosts the system, so do measurements and decide for yourself if you're okay with the load/unload cycles per hour increase rate of the system you're using.
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[Unlocked] Acer Aspire 5750G
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