Dead aspire one

So apparently the downgrade didn't work. I followed the instructions on Macels' page and had aquired the supposed 3109 software thru the links provided on this thread, both RS and H and it still says 3114.

Anyone have a valid version of 3109?

where's...

--myLostSphincter

 

Same here my bios shows 3114, but at least my bios shows up....before AAO was dead and didnt boot at all....lets hope my AAO was dead due to the bios and Acer comes soon with a stable and good version.

Was your AAO dead as well? If so it did the trick huh you can go in the bios again. But if you can get the actual version into your bios let us kow were to get that bios you're after.

 

@ Mylostsphincer: where you installing osx in the internal drive or in an external one? I just recovered mine after trying to install to external HD.

 

@ralfaro: it was an external USB drive that I was installing into.

 

Wow, the same. Then I'll try osx the last time but in the internal drive. Thanks!

 

I don't think that will make a difference. I'm thinking that something during the initial shutdown of the machine maybe causing bios corruption regardless of OS X or XP. Although my experience has been during the shutdown and reboot of OS X primarily. It hasn't happened under XP like other have posted on this thread.

wheres..

--myLostSphincter

 

My second Aspire died on me again! Damnit. I rebooted the thing and all of a sudden I get the blank screen again. I originally had the 3114 bios.

this time I figure I might as well try to flash the bios with the instructions in this thread. I downloaded a supposed 3109 bios, and flashed it. It came to life again!! yay. Yet when I look in the bios settings it still says 3114. Where can I get the 3109? I really don't want it to die on me when I'm on the road. might have to keep the usb key with flash files on me... darn.

 

I got the 3109 bios from a link here at Rapidshare. However, after the bios recovery, it still says 3114.

So to get 3109, I had to do a BIOS recovery, which still showed up as 3114. I then booted into Freedos and ran the flashit program again and this time it flashed to v3109! So basically two flashes.

I hope it doesn't mess up again.... My GF is looking for a netbook as well, and after this experience I don't know if I can recommend the aspire to her... maybe a MSI Wind

 

After restoring process, you have to manually reflash to 3109! Boot to DOS and then type:

Code:

flashit ZG5_3109.fd /all

You can download my original 3109 I have shared before. Please search it in this topic. Sorry, my English not good enough.

 

this works for me THANKS MAN!. Btw my bios starts with ZD5_ and not ZG5_ .

With the "old" bios 3109 my AAO runs approx. 10 degrees Celsius hotter

 

Plaase be aware that Acer regard a memory upgrade as an automatic violation of your warranty (doesn't matter who does it).

This is despite the fact that they advertise on their own website that there is a free DIMM socket and that the machine is upgradeable to 1.5GB!!

How can you upgrade to 1.5GB if it is impossible to go into the machine!

 

This may be useful as an additional measure.
http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/clea ... e-one.html

 

I have been doing some calculations based on the recent poll of users reporting the "black screen" problem:

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1392

So far 20 members of the forum have reported this problem (as of 30-Aug).

Of these 12 users reported that they had made no modiciation to the memory of their machine which would confirm this is not memory related.

Currently this forum has about 4000 members so this implies a failure rate of 20/4000 =0.5% (5000ppm).

This obviously assumes one unit per user, although of course there are many members of the forum that have not (yet) purchased the One. There way of course be a few people that have more than 2 or more. Also it ignores the fact that there may be a few people that joined up expressely to participate in the poll.

Failures within a day or two of using the Atom to several months. The nature of the problem would indicate that this is generic and is this not an infant mortaility issue (e.g. defective motherboard). From this we should conclude that the failure rate will be constant with time since all machines are equally at risk.

If we assume that machines have typically failed after about 1 month of use with a use level of about 2-3 hours per day this implies a mean time to failure of aroubnd 100 hrs (ballpark figure).

The MTBF (mean time between failures) will then be very roughly the mean time to failure divided by the failure rate: I.e.

100/0.005 = 20,000 hours.

This is dreadfully low. Even hard disks which are notorious for failure have MTBFs of several hundred thousand hours. This is at least on order of magnitude below this.

It also implies a return rate of approximately 5% within the one year warranty period and 15% for the 3 year extended warranty.

Even if Acer release a Bios that sorts this out it will be difficult to get most people to do this at home as it requires a relatively high degree of computer knowledge. These machines are sold to the general public, the vast majority of whom will not have the requisite knowledge.

At this failure level Acer should seriously consider whether a general product recall (assuming that they can fix it through a Bios upgrade) would be the best approach.

The expected marked for the SCC (small cheap computer) segment is thought to be around 10m pieces through to the end of 2008. Acer is one of the leading players and one ccould expect there to be maybe 3 million Aspire Ones sold worldwide this year.

If we make the extrapolation that 5% of users will need service then this equates to 150,000 units requiring customer service during the warranty period.

Even if the problem can be fixed through a simple reprogramming of the Bios it will probably still cost the order of $100 per unit to fix (including shipping costs).

Acer's potential exposure to this problem is then potentially the order of $15 million dollars. However because of claims through the extended warranty program, failures for other reasons etc their exposure is likely to be much higher, maybe 20-30 M$.

The loss of goodwill etc resulting from this issue is difficult to gauge financially but could be even higher than this. This would represent the loss of sales of both the Aspire One but potentially also other products tarnished by this.

I know that there are assumptions in this which may turn out not to be valid and it is probably a worst case scenario. However if I was in Acer management then I would be seriously concerned. A drop in income of 20 million USD is a signicant amount. To put it in persepctive Acer announed a 175 million dollar profit for 1H 2008 so potentially they are looking at a 5% drop in income as a result of this (and possibly high looking at lost sales opportunities etc).

 

Hi everybody,

I am owner of an AA1 A150 and I experienced the black screen on start up after 2 days of use, after shutting down. I use the method indicated and now the AA1 is back to live. I use WinXP on it. In this time I used it for intesive install with restarts and also booting from USB.

 

So all in all what is morale of this story? Do not upgrade BIOS? or something else? :mrgreen:

 

Mine lasted an entire 2 days as well, mine was a bios ver .3114 model AOA-150-1570. I didn't touch the hardware and never touched a screw.

And it seems BB is currently out of stock online and nobody within 100 miles has them in-store either, my only regret was not getting the Linpus version and prob shoulda got the dreaded instore warranty.

 

It happened again...

After another 2 days...It seems will happen at every 2 days...

I also did not any hardware modification...I hope will find a way to avoid this.

 

@emilb
Read my comments about manual downgrade on page 13 and get my 0.3109 rapidshare link on page 8. Good luck!

@macles
Just found restoring process only fix something to make AA1 back alive but not overwriting the old BIOS.

 

Just a quick note to mention that I have also brought my One back from the dead using the method described by macles.

I was about to cry when I thought the thing was dead forever.

Saved my day

 

just wanted to say thanks to all. mine crapped out last night after a reboot. i had booted from a usb drive running linux. same symptoms as everyone else. i took out the battery and unplugged it over night and nothing... until i reflashed it. what a life saver!

has anyone contacted acer about this issue and actually gotten some kind of response acknowledging the faulty bios? we should all be emailing or something, right? i'm loving this laptop and just hope it's software related and NOT faulty hardware.

anyway, thanks again...