Acer Support Coming – Driver Automation

The Driver Automation Tool has been one of those solutions that keeps giving over the years, and when I say that, I mean keeps giving me a job to do.. by keeping it up to date. Today I am announcing with the new V8 release due in the coming weeks, support for a new OEM is being added, namely Acer.

OEM Support

There are still a lot of admins out there today using the solution that me and Nickolaj Andersen created way back in 2017, and one of the things we have been blessed with over the years, is support from the OEM’s.

Some of you might not be aware, but some of the OEM’s supported today in the Modern Driver and BIOS automation solutions did not have their own catalogue feeds back when we started, and it is through a cooperative development, we have have been able to help OEM’s to help the community and even their own tooling.

I was approached by Acer back in June, which was not for the first time, however, this time the call was from Acer HQ in Taiwan. Their ask was simple, they wanted to have their enterprise line products added to the Driver Automation Tool in response to their customers using Configuration Manager to deploy their hardware.

Fast forward to today, and after the summer holidays and conference season, I am actively working on integrating their products, however, there is more. You see the real reason I am developing the new V8 release is to add proper support for Intune, allowing you, the admin, to have full driver package control.

More on that to come in a later post..

OEM Test Hardware

In order to add support for different vendors to the solution, test hardware plays a part. Acer in this case has provided me with sample test hardware for me to build the solution, as a community effort (i.e. in my own time), and to help feedback development ideas to their team, so they can make their own enterprise catalogues and tools better.

Without the hardware to test with, it is difficult to ensure the WMI classes used are optimal, the differences between baseboard and systemsku values, and which unique identifier should be used.

Although I appreciate the entire community for feedback with testing, there is no substitute for running through a task sequence or querying PowerShell direct on the device.

New Daily Driver – Predator Orion 7000

No pun intended, but my daily driver for this development process is now one of those test devices, which takes the form of the Predator Orion 7000.

The Orion 7000 is basically aimed at the gaming market, however, as I do a lot of virtual machine lab testing, and run the toolset / environment used for physical testing on the same device, gaming machines tend to offer the best mix of high spec CPU and memory out of the box.

The 7000 in this case replaces my now 3 1/2 year old Alienware R10 Ryzen edition, which was no slouch with a Ryzen 9 5950x and 128GB of ram, and whereas the 7000 does provide higher CPU speeds with the Intel i9 14900KF, the ram more constrained at 64GB’s. This is something I am going to rectify in the new year.

Having used the Alienware for the number of years and being generally quite happy with its performance, I have become tone deaf to the level of fan noise from the box. Upon replacing the device, the difference was quite surprising. I had expected the device to be, if anything, even more loud due to the massive set of fans in the unit.

What I was not expecting as a substantial drop in ambient noise, so much so, that I have compared the two in the below decibel meter screenshots, showing the different idle fan noise values;

Ambient Noise Baseline

Acer Predator Orion 7000

Alienware R10 Ryzen Edition

The next thing that I was impressed by is the build quality. Having not been familiar with the Acer product range, let alone their gaming desktop range, what I can say is that this unit feels more like a high end custom gaming desktop. When I say that, I mean it in a good way, it feels premium, cable management is very tidy, the ambient lighting isn’t overboard but provides a nice visual experience, and overall it feels far less of a plastic tower that the R10 did.

The PO7 runs noticeably cooler than the R10 also, which is partly due to the CPU differences and the fact I would be on average using more efficiency cores on the new CPU than performance ones, but that is something that I have also noted. One last thing is the fact this device was also something I could set up with my corporate environment without having to have workarounds, as the device supports PCR12 binding, something that the R10 didn’t, and for those of you requiring SecureBoot (as you should) in your compliance policies, the R10 couldn’t report this to Intune, even though it was enabled.

On the whole I am definitely wouldn’t be overjoyed to going back to the R10 in this instance, not because that was a bad machine, just because I can work in peace and quiet now. Would I personally recommend the Predator Orion 7000? Of course, yes, if you in the market for something like this and don’t wan’t to get your hands dirty building a machine, then this provides the added reassurance of an OEM build with the associated all-in warranty.

Minor Issue – Predator Sense Software

One thing I have noticed as feedback to Acer is that the Predator Sense software stops working upon auto update from the installed 4.2.411 release. In this case I downloaded the 4.2.411 installation and re-installed the appx packages to regain access to the application;

Post reinstall:

Now onto the Driver Automation Tool, the real purpose for the blog (I’ll leave hardware reviews to the likes of Linus Tech Tips – Linus Tech Tips – YouTube)

Driver Automation Tool Update

Fun fact but Acer was actually originally supported by the Driver Automation Tool going back to 2017/2018, but subsequently removed as their list of Configuration Manager driver packages was being scrapped from their website and I wanted to avoid scrapping issues due to website changes etc – Acer | Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager for Acer Computers.

In order to help the OEM help the community, an XML has been put together which is in test at the moment and will be the source for their products with the V8 release of the tool. Below is a screenshot of the new UI working with their product catalogue (which is limited at present for testing purposes);

Driver Automation Tool Update – Development Feedback

Acer is keen to get their toolset up to scratch for enterprise customers, and I’m actively providing feedback to their team.

This includes automation and processes for updating firmware, which are today manually driven. Due to this the Acer addition to the Driver Automation Tool will be for Drivers only. I hope this will be rectified by the team in Acer, so that enterprise deployments with Configuration Manager can leverage this process.

Thank You

A special thank you goes to the team in Acer Taiwan and Switzerland for their input so far, and for arranging the test hardware, which I am using to build in support for their products, and ultimately help you, the system admins out there who need to support this platform.

As always just a note to say this is a community tool, lots of long hours have gone into the development over the years, all of which during my own personal time. I appreciate that at times I have not been able to update this as much as I would have liked, however, this might change in the future…

More to come..