Intermittent backlight flicker on AAo

Hi, guys.

I'm a pretty new owner - only had my 120GB Linux AAO since Friday. Actually, that's not completely true, since I've only had this one since Saturday, as the first one went back after I noticed a slight, intermittent flicker in the backlight. Unfortunately, AAO No2 has it as well. It only seems to occur in the lower half of the range of brighness adjustment range, and is quite subtle - the flicker only lasts a second or so, and the brightness level only fluctuates by about half a step of the brightness control. Still, it's a bit annoying.

I'm wondering if this is actually a design fault, seeing as the second one has it too. The second one has a bonus buzzing noise in the chassis as well, which is set off by the fan spinning at its standard speed. Sigh, Acer's quality control doesn't seem to be gob-smacking, I have to say.

I'm planning on opening my AAO up in the not too distant future, not only to add a Gig of memory, but also to find out which screw needs to be tightened to stop the buzzing (I've already tightened those which can be easily reached in the chassis, and that hasn't helped much) and then put an nLited version of XP on the hard drive.

It's a shame about these problems, as otherwiseI really like this machine. The main reason I went for it over the others on offer was because of the screen quality, which really does seem to be excellent for the price.

Cheers, Jon.

 

There's another thread about this somewhere in here. In a nutshell, when the load on the cpu changes, the backlight flickers. This is only noticeable on the dimmest settings. Acer fixed this in a bios update, by removing the lowest settings :x

Someone else also posted a 'fix' to the buzzing fan. By bending part of the fan shroud it stopped it resonating. There's pics attached to the thread to show which bits to bend.

Keith

 

Hi, Keith.

Thanks for the info. Looks as if the problems keep coming - it locked up just now. I left it for about 5 minutes, but it didn't break out of it, so I had to pull the battery out. When I restarted, it sat on the blue boot-up screen for quite a while as the hard drive light stayed lit, then restarted. It booted OK after that, so I'm assuming it was scanning the hard drive as Windows does after an 'unauthorised' shutdown. Doesn't fill me with confidence though...

Cheers, Jon.

 

Yep, It does the 'double boot' when you don't shut down properly. It's a bit like windows booting from a 'last known good bootup', it just does it on the fly without user input. Just pulling the battery out is really not a good idea, there may be a disk read/write process in the background, press and hold the power button for 6 seconds or so to force a shut down, much less likely to corrupt something.

Cheers

Keith

 

"
There's another thread about this somewhere in here. In a nutshell, when the load on the cpu changes, the backlight flickers. This is only noticeable on the dimmest settings. Acer fixed this in a bios update, by removing the lowest settings :x "

I have this problem i think at the lowest setting. My version is 3114. i dont think that is the latest bios, funny thing is i brought it yesterday and it has the 160gig xp 1gig ram on it. Why didnt it come with the latest bios? i am a little worried about updating the bios as it might somehow screw it up or void my warranty. im noob.