Fanless Aspire One

I'm wondering if its a quality control issue at Acer. Why don't they test for this kind of stuff? Can we be sure that it is the fan that makes the whining noise? I guess its the only moving part. The Atom can run fanless I have heard.
Maybe we could try contacting acer tech support so they can try to get us a bios to fix this. Please let us know if changing the fan or adding resistors etc works.
(note my kid is not bothered at all by it though)
Appreciated

 

Well, I killed it dead.

And as it was clearly me that did it, I think trying to return it would be taking the mickey somewhat.

It went like this: I took it apart again (that was the mistake), disconnected the fan, put it loosely back together, turned it on...

It booted normally (but silently) as far as the Ubuntu desktop, then as it tried to connect to wifi, it powered down. This is basically in line with other people's observations; I wanted to, among other things, see if the behaviour was Linpus-specific and wouldn't happen with Ubuntu. What I proved instead was that Ubuntu's longer boot sequence used up all the time before the power-down.

I tried again, and got almost as far - It powered down a few seconds sooner.

I tried again, this time with it sitting on a bag of frozen peas! I managed to log in, join wifi, and sit doing nothing for a minute or so. Then I tried to launch the system monitor and... it powered down.

I plugged the fan back in, deciding to admit defeat. Put everything back properly...

On power-on the fan started immediately, and there was a problem with the display: The bios screen was pushed into the top-left corner, and the top of it repeated underneath it - a 640x480 console of course with 1:1 pixel-to-screen mapping - ie: it wasn't being scaled up to fill the screen. However, it booted into Ubuntu and the desktop came up - again, in a smaller (it could manage 800x480 iirc) resolution, but unscaled, and the top of the desktop repeating below it.

Reboot, into bios, reset to setup defaults (not that I'd changed anything, not that there's much that can be changed). No difference.

Disassemble far enough to check the seating of the display connector, try to see any problems with the (fragile-looking) lead. Couldn't see anything wrong. Reseated connector anyway. Put it back together.

Turn on, boots into Ubuntu, I log in, and because of the netbook ui I don't notice for a little while that the trackpad isn't working. It isn't, so I lift the keyboard to check the trackpad connector is properly in place (assuming I'd forgotten...) I hadn't forgotten, but I attempt to reseat it anyway...

And I think that was my other mistake, because in my impatience I did so while the machine was still powered up. Then it powered down. Now there's no life in it at all. Power button does nothing; if mains power is plugged in the mains light doesn't even come on. Nothing. Totally dead.

I probably zapped a chip in one of those disassemblies, and it cascaded from there or something. The cat was brushing round my legs towards the end trying to get attention at a bad time; might have been something like that.

:-(

Mind you it's only the second machine I broke by opening it. The first was an Intel Mac Mini, and that's *much* fiddlier to work inside than the Aspire One - but at least I knew *what* i'd broken (SATA connector on backplane riser) and was able to order a replacement part and get it going again...

This is... *so* dead. :-(

 

Sad to hear that mate, I know it doesn't help but at least it didn't cost a fortune. I wouldn't dare fiddling around with mine if it wasn't so cheap.

PS Total death in computers either means motherboard or power. I guess it's screwed either way unless you can look carefully on the motherboard for a burnt up resistor or something similar.

 

From what I have read it appears that the wining problem is non existent or atleast not as bad with the older bios versions. If you look at the bois change log there is alot of stuff in it where the fan settings have been messed with. Hopefully a simple bios update will help the problem.

rachel,

that freaking sucks! Static electricity might have got it or it could just be the condensation from the cooling of the components caused by the frozen peas. I remember reading before about a guy up north that thought it would be smart to run an airduct from outside his house and run it to his computer case. I don't know the outside air temp but I know that it was lower outside than inside. Once he had the duct set up the computer would not turn on. Removing the duct fixed the problem. So it doesn't take much condensation moister to cause a computer to freak out. Hopefully that is the only problem. I would remove the power cord and battery and set it somewhere for a day or so before messing with it again. Also I have fixed alot of computer problems before by just taking everything apart and putting it back together again. That might be the next step if they problem doesn't go away.

But judging from your experiment I am still wondering what is causing the computer to shut off without the fan plugged in. It sort of sounds like the temp gets too high although I really find that hard to believe with a 2 watt cpu. If that is the cause then maybe the heat sink is not in place right? I haven't even seen any picks of the cpu so I am guessing that it is located under the metal fan duct thing on the bottom of the board? Hopefully someone can enlighten us as to how the contact between the cpu and heatsink is. I plan on buying one of these this week. err not sure if I want to take it apart now though

 

I don't think that was the problem. There wasn't that much condensation even on the bag of peas itself; and the "won't even power up" problem came some time later, certainly time enough for it to get back up to ambient and for any condensation (which I couldn't see anyway) to evaporate.

Yeah, actually, after I posted that I gave it a go with the power in but battery out and it started up - same graphics problem as before (also described here: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=83 except there it looks like it was scaling to fullscreen.

So I took it apart again, planning to check the display connector and the path the wires went, and generally make sure everything gets nicely re-seated; and also to briefly remove the cmos battery to make sure the bios hasn't remembered anything bad...

And the bloody clip the battery's mounted in was holding it so tightly that it snapped off its contacts on the mainboard.

Been a bad day. Started getting weirdness in my vision just about then, so I reckoned I'd been staring too closely at tiny components enough for one day. At the moment I'm actually wondering whether it's worth buying soldering kit tomorrow to even attempt the fix, given the other issues and my demonstrated cack-handedness...

Quite. It just doesn't seem to get that hot. Certainly the fan starts up even if the machine is actually cold. It's as if it just decides that if it's been running at full clock-speed for a certain amount of time the fan must go on.

It's under the duct - actually reverse that, it's over the duct, because that side of the mainboard is mounted facing downwards. The fan blows air past it towards the vent next to the vga connector. I took the fan/duct assembly off briefly yesterday while fitting the ram, and put it back. I'd done it to see if there was an easy way to replace just the fan itself with a similar bought as a spare (though that would be hard to find too it seems).

There are tacky pads on the other side of the duct that press down on the cpu and another chip which I'm guessing is either southbridge or graphics (it's basically right between the internal and external display connectors, so guessing that's the GMA950). It occurred to me later that that wasn't like the kind of use-once heatsink compound I'm used to from full-size PC building (and that maybe it had been a mistake to remove the fan assembly), but there wasn't any change to any of the machine behaviour, including fan behaviour, from before and after doing that.

I'm about ready to put this one down to experience, or punishment for the first impulse purchase I've made for about a year. Or for that impulse purchase not being a Mac for once... They don't make one in the form-factor I want. TBH at the moment I'm wishing I'd instead spent half as much to buy all the spares needed to fix a friend's Powerbook Pismo. (Now that is how you make a laptop.) And as she's handier with a soldering iron than I am I may instead just do the "if you fix it, you can keep it" thing... and wait for the netbook product lines to fill out and mature a bit as was my original plan until I held one in my hands in a shop and went all stupid!

 

if i saw the AA1 i wanted in a store, or anywhere in stock on the net. I would buy it OH SO QUICKLY!

 

They have them in stock in PC World

 

It lives! (this is me typing on it)

With slight dementia though. The temporary pre-buying-soldering-stuff-and-trying-to-do-it-properly fix for the bios battery hasn't held, so it loses its time if both main battery and mains are unplugged; but why would I ever do that? Luckily no other bios settings are off default so it's not a serious issue.

Display problem resolved apparently by me fiddling with that loose ribbon lead and making *really* sure that it's all covered by the plastic film (part of it had escaped, it didn't look like it was putting wires in contact with other wires but I guess it was causing a problem somewhere).

So now it's more or less working as well as ever... fan's still noisy! :lol:

I think this will do now until such a time as a decent fix for the fan is available - maybe when spares start filtering through to the market.

 

rachel,

Good to hear that it still works!

I had emailed the acer tech support yesterday with questions about this. They got back with me today with a less than ideal answer:

I am still not sure what umpc to buy. Everything else out there it too expensive pretty much. The dell eslim should be out tomorrow. I thought I was going to get that but it has a butchered keyboard with missing keys. Not sure if I would even want to bother with that.

 

The other one I was looking at most was the MSI Wind, or the PCWorld/Advent rebadging thereof. I saw the Advent version at the same time as the Acer in PCWorld on Saturday, having by that time almost decided to buy that and not the Acer for other technical reasons (not least the uncertainty about the SSD units installed, but I hadn't read about the noise problem).

But actually seeing and handling them, the Acer still won. But, hmm. The noise problem is a real spoiler, and it means that I may replace this with something else later; this will do until the netbook market is more developed and has more choice actually available for purchase now!

(It might even end up being a later revision of the AA1.)

 

I received my Aspire One 120Gig model this afternoon. I can definitely hear the fan, but I wouldn't describe the sound as high-pitched at all. I don't find the noise annoying. I'd say the noise is about the same as a Dell laptop I have. My feeling is that the Aspire is operating normally and some fan noise is just part of package. I'm very relieved that the noise isn't high pitched.

 

Never said it was high-pitched. But it does *have* a tone, as distinct from the sound of mere rushing air.

I opened mine again, and managed to arrange things so I could have the fan powered up while it was accessible with my fingers. the sound is definitely caused by vibration. If i lightly touch the metal fan surround in one or two places it reduces enormously and sometimes even vanished completely.

Oddly enough, or not, there's already a dampening pad and a strip of dampening material on the fan housing at more or less the points where a little extra pressure from my fingers solved the problem; so it seems they're aware of it but their dampening attempts weren't sufficient either.

I've yet to have any success at getting that kind of improvement once the whole thing is re-assembled for normal use. Most recent try (the current state of affairs) has almost the entire metal housing of the fan encased in blu-tak! (With airflow preserved in and out of course.) With that open to the air on my desk the whine, while still just about present, was almost inaudible above the ambient in my computer room. But with the unit reassembled it's just the same as it ever was. There must be some kind of knack to this I'm not getting... Very frustrating.

Meanwhile getting the display connector reattached such that it all works properly is getting more and more dodgy. A couple of the clips that hold the keyboard down aren't functional any more either. Likewise the clips holding the top (not the lid) to the base around the edges are getting looser too - at the moment it just makes it easier to take apart, and still feels solid when re-assembled, but that may not always be the case. Accelerated wear and tear from opening it up so many times - already surely far more times than intended for its design lifetime. :-( I don't want to open it too many more times.

It's probably the case that we really need a bios update that either defines better default fan behaviour or exposes the sensor and control acpi stuff so they can be controlled by software. Or just a better fan unit. Even better: All of the above.

 

So it is just vibration ay? Thats some nice investigating!

 

Great work Rachel!!

I would like to know if someone manage to know how to disassembly the BIOS code. I did the update to BIOS yesterday... that flash utility to DOS looks like to me that tools for disassembly and assembly, analyses the BIOS, should be generally used... does anyone knows where is more information about? how about some tutorials?

On change log of BIOS looks like a lot of changes to that "fan table"... - maybe is just a question of find a way to alter that "fan table" to be able to disable the fan or put it at a very slow speed. Also important to do this is to find the IC that holds this BIOS code... I remember to see on the eee pc 701 a picture and information how to recover a bad BIOS flash tentative!!

I have tools to solder (in case I flash some bad BIOS code) and I can try to flash BIOS... (altought I didn't open yet my aa1).

 

when laptops are scaled down to this extent, the margin of tolerance becomes far lower so i can understand why theres more vibration

 

There is always possibility of optimization! Simple, people of Acer don't have time for that, but we, the users, we are many more and have much more time than them ;-) -- let's work on that ;-)

 

Yes we did it.. i posted the before that the aspire one has high quality fan and there is problem with the high rpm speed but i think the vibration noise could be resolved by placing one piece of grid tape between the fan and the One's case.

About the fanless One... :roll:

I don't think it is possible.
This month i have to use the One 24/7 and there is 32Celsius in the room.. I had the place the One on to an old metal pc case because of heat and the pc case is warm and the left part of the One is still hot!

 

Spire, are you a worker from Acer? are you testing Aspire One during that 24/7?

I don't use my AA1 more than 2 hours, I would prefer to have silent and hot pc while that 2 hours instead the actual noise AA1 :-( :-(

 

At the moment i have only this Aspire One. Heavy user, during 24/7.
The cooling is very small in the One and there are 2 things: cpu and chipset(vga). Without fan.. good luck :shock:

 

well, i may just decide it's better to hang back and wait for a fanless netbook. Someone will make one.

Seriously, it's the only moving part in the whole thing and it's causing *all* the grief.

I tried a sticky pad i had left over from a PC build (I think it was supposed to go with the zalman fan speed controller (there's an idea...)) before the blu-tak, both between the fan and the case; it seems not to help.