ARGH - aspire 2010 woes

[Geoff Mysynuk]

I've got an acer aspire 2010 notebook...
the thing totally rawks windows. but i hate windows
I do love freebsd and I use it on my stand alone system and wish to install it on my notebook. I know it has a few issues with certain notebooks, but when I tried to install 5.3 it froze while loading the kernel.
it's an i686 architecture.
I've got plenty of everything to run the system with, however...
when it begins to detect the pci bus, it hangs.
I've tried it both with and without acpi.
(I'm kind of a noobie, but I'm not an idiot... )
does anyone have any sort of advice?

it's much appreciated if you do!
Thanks in advance.

-Max