Dead aspire one

You won't void your warranty by reverting to an earlier version of the official bios.

 

I still believe the vast majority of problems reported here were due to a very buggy v.3114 BIOS implementation. A bad BIOS can also cause hardware damage that a reflash cannot solve. So until Acer comes up with an "official" explanation this crap will stay off my Ones' EEPROMS! The Atom chipset is still really new, and WE are the beta testers...

 

Made a good deal with my reseller. They will replace my dead AOA110 + ~US$70 with a brand new AOA150 but have to wait about 1 week since out of stock. Huh!

 

Your reseller made you pay more than you had planned to, and made you think it was a good deal? He's good alright!

 

Here the difference between the two is $20, not $70! You might want to check that?!

 

This is the 3114 version, I've restored to it and gave me the 3114 version on the boot screen.
And after using the Fn+Esc method for recovering the bios, it blanked out again after 4 or 5 reboots (another proof that that version is still 3114.

Marcel

 

I fr*ckn love you guys Its ALIVE !!!!! Even tough it still boots with the version 3114? i guess the link is wrong or Acer made another mistake.
Hope it stays on for good this time

Cheers,
Tony

 

Big succes over here! I nearly had arranged to get picked up my dead AcerOne, but as a lost resort I tried this bios flash tip. I'm typing this text on my recovered Acer. Thank you very, VERY MUCH!

Several days ago I had upgraded the bios to the last version, and had no problems at all with it.
Very strange a bios can kill a machine after a few days...

 

How odd... Bios version number stays 3114, no matter which Bios restore i've tried.
The One is working and even memtest86+ seems to be error free.

PS: I just cancelled the pick up and return so Hope it will last this time.

Cheers,
Tony

 

Thanks ever so much for the bios flashing tip!

Mine gave out on a regular reboot, nothing fancy. The biggest thing is: I haven't even messed about with installing memory or flashing biosses yet, since I have the A150 with a gig installed.

I flashed with the 3.114 version, and it lives once more. Can't say for how long though, so perhaps I should flash to 3.09 to be safe. Or are there reports of the 150 crashing with that one as well?

Any outlook on when it would become stable enough?

 

I contacted Acer by e-mail regarding this problem this morning. To be honest I am not sure they read properly what I had sent them as all they suggested is to restore back to Linux and made no comment regarding the possible bios issue (I referred them to this thread to show that this was a systematic problem).

Not happy with this as I want to run Windows. In any case this is irrelevant as the machine is in for repair (sent in just before the Bios restore trick was posted).

Personally I can't see that this can be related to the operating system (and in any case I assume the motherboards for the Linux and Win/XP versions of the One are the same). Out of interest has anyone experienced the black screen problem whilst running under Linux?

Also, for that matter has anyone experienced this problem with the installed (v3109) Bios?

In any case I would hope that the QA people at Acer would follow this up as they will have a lot of people needing repairs.

 

@apaige, beano
Maybe different country, different price but I will check to Acer distributor directly.

@schmitzoide, edgecrush
How about after back alive, flash again using my BIOS at rapidshare? It is my AA1 original BIOS.

 

@Achilles
Please check: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html
Maybe Acer BIOS have a routine to prevent user installing XP on AOA110.

 

Will give a try later. Thanks!

Marcel

 

Can't believe that this can be true. I noticed that the 0.3114v is available for download for both the 110 and 150 versions of the One. The 150 includes a Win/XP version out of the box.

The fact that both the 110 and the 150 have the same bios I think also implies that they have the same motherboard and that the only differences are in the size of the case, HDD vs SDD storage etc.

However the Bios does appear to check the OS on POST. This could be to fine tune settings according to the OS (e.g. fan speeds) but I suppose it might do something nasty when Windows is detected. I would doubt that this is deliberate (since it would also presumably affect 150s with Win/XP pre-installed) and is more likely a case of poor engineering and quality control. In any case there is no prohibition on installing a different OS on these machines and Acer must be aware that many users will buy the Linux version and install their own version of Windows.

One interesting experiment would be to check the processor core temperature running Windows OS using Bios v3109 vs v3114 and comparing that with running the two bios versions under Linux. This might help to identify whether this is a thermal problem. Although the Atom is low power there is no microprocessor fan and I think the chip does run rather hot (70deg?).

 

Wow great find, I wish this would have been posted before I sent in my A150 to be repaired, would have saved me 50 dollars in shipping.

 

Not trying to clog up this thread, but my XP/150 machine came preinstalled with 3114, and all is still fine (2wks).

I had turned off hibernation (some seemed to have issues waking up), since I've had issues with this feature on other machines in the past.

Maybe it's just when you upgrade the bios on an older board?

My machine:

Manufacturer : Acer
Version : v0.3114
Date : 05 September 2008

I know it changed the fan patturns, but what else did the bios upgrade say it altered from the previous 3109v?

 

@jpnjim
Maybe because your AA1 came from the future

 

Very interesting. I wonder whether later 110's also come with v.3114 BIOS?

The release notes for v0.3114 were as follows (as posted on the blog)

Doesn't mean a whole lot to me I'm afraid but it is interesting to see that the settings are OS dependent. Also, I wonder what the shutdown no function issue is.

Maybe what we are looking at is that a bunch of early 110s were shipped with faulty main boards. These are only now coming to light. What effect the BIOS has is not clear. Maybe it simply accelerates the failure so that it occurs within days rather than months or years (e.g. if the problem is thermally related and the bios change allows things to run a few degrees hotter).

 

Then why would the bios recovery cause it to work again? This sounds a lot like a classic bad flash of a bios, or in tis case, just a bad bios...