Acer Laptop

Hello, i have an acer laptop that i had to do a reinstall of windows vista. As i had not created the recovery discs when i purchased the laptop i used one from a dell pc. All worked well apart from i cannot get direct x to install from windows web site. when i come to do the software validation on the web site it will not carry out the task cos' i do not have active x. have tried to load active x but it does not seem to work. Help.Please.