missing icons in system tray

I have a AA1-150 with the 160gb drive, and I'm very happy with it so far. Everything works including my Mic. There is just one thing that continues to irritate me, that is the missing speaker icon and the battery icon in the system tray. I can go to sound properties and uncheck the "place icon in the system tray" box then apply it, then go back and recheck it and it, (the speaker icon) will work until I reboot then it's gone again. That I can actually live with because I don't have much need to mess with the volume anyway, but the battery icon I miss. I have tried all the suggestions and once I got it to stay on for awhile then it was gone again. I have to go to power setting and check the battery level there which is a pain. I know there other battery monitors out there, but they don't seem to work as well as the stock Windows one. Has anybody made any progress on this?

For what it's worth I found that I could get the battery icon to come back after cleaning the registry with CCleaner a few times, so would that indicate a registry problem maybe? I installed XP Pro SP3 on my Daughters old Think Pad last week and all the icons are there all the time, so this leads me to believe my problems are caused by this trimmed down version of XP that Acer uses on the AA1.

 

Right click on taskbar, click properties, taskbar -> customise and change the battery to always show. If it fails then right click on the taskbar, properties and uncheck hide inactive icons. This will bring everything up. Hope that works for you .

 

Thanks, that worked for a little while, but after a reboot it was gone again. Back to the drawing board.

 

Caulktel, is the aa1 you have the one from WalMart? I think you mentioned you tried 3 from Costco and all had the broken mic. You're probably like me and have added a bunch of programs so I'll bet none of them affected the mic. This would say that whatever is different about good mic aa1s, they don't revert to bad mic when you add software. Still have the deaf mic here, but will probably keep the aa1 anyway since it works great with external headset (and mic).

 

Yeah, the one have is the one I got from Wal-Mart. I have uninstalled all the crap it came with an installed all the stuff I wanted and the mic is still working great, in fact I use it everyday to talk to my Dad in California on Skype. I'm thankful my mic is working but I would like the battery icon to work too. Oh well, I guess with Windose you can't have everything, oh wait you can! It's called OS X.

 

Do you have to use headphones to avoid echo when using the aa1 mic? It used to be if the mic gets too close to the speakers you got horrible echoes on skype. If you didn't have to use headphones to kill the echo, either Acer thought this out and placed the speakers out of feedback range, or skype is improved. I noticed though right clicking the Realtek icon in the system tray that the software has an echo canceling feature. If Acer/Realtek thought about canceling the echo, it's too bad they didn't think about making the mic work on all their aa1s. By the way, does your receipt from Walmart show the serial number of your aa1?

 

No, I don't have to use headphones I just use the built in mic and speakers and my 80 year old father thinks it is better audio and video than my Mac Mini with a iSight camera. I am using the echo cancellation in the Realtech HD settings, so no feed back problems at all.

I see some of the advise on this board saying to disable the echo cancellation, but I haven't seen any reason to do so because it's working so well. I don't know what this deaf mic thing is all about, but it makes me mad that Acer is not addressing the issue any better, I mean sending the computer back to repair is stupid, why don't they just figure it out and send out a update to fix it as it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.

 

I agree, in fact I had my aa1 mic working briefly on 3 occasions only to go deaf after the next power on, That tells me it's software. Did you notice whether your receipt shows the s/n?

 

echo canceling feature doesn't really make a lot of difference. Echo canceling feature decrease the sound output a little bit as a side effect.

For your disappearing battery icon, you can apply a temporary fix by employing a keyboard shortcut. Make a short cut to the power options somewhere on your computer. Then set a keyboard shortcut to the short cut by right clicking the shortcut icon and go to the shortcut tab. There's a field called shortcut key:. Set your keyboard shortcut to the shortcut and click ok.

LOL, i've used the word shortcut way to many times

 

Yes my receipt showed my serial number on it.

 

jacklu923,

Thanks for the keyboard shortcut idea, but it's already mapped to FN + F3 key. What I want is to fix it properly, so I will keep looking.