Netbook freezes randomly

I sent my ao751h for repair after a 3206 BIOS update froze in the middle of the update. I was trying to correct the random freezing problem I was having. It came back scratched on the top lid and on the bezel around the screen. It was in perfect condition when it left. It came back with these light scratches. They replaced the main board. Not only was it scatched, but I could not get the wifi to work at all afterwards. Its now back with them to be fixed again.

 

That is such a horrible experience, I'm so sorry to hear that. Good thing you sent it again for repair. Did you complain about the scratches?

Mine was exactly the same when I got it back, but they didn't address any problem at all. Still the same issues and I don't want to send it back for repair
because it took so long the first time.

We should really report this to consumer fraud or the BBB. This is just unacceptable. My first time to purchase a very defective gadget. I will also definitely
boycott Acer next time. Its not worth the money spent and your time.

 

I complained about the scratches, and its listed in the ticket, but I'll just be happy at this point if it comes back working. They definitely ship it back in what I would call VERY flimsy packaging, as described by others on here. I can't return to store as it was over a month since I bought it. Now that HP has introduced a 11.6 netbook (the Mini 311), I'm wishing I had waited.

 

when i sent my i wrote e letter and put in the box there i wrote that they shall return the notebook in the original box and careful wrepped in i`ll hope they do it. has enyone try to run the notebook without the batteri mountet as i wrote in another reply...

 

As one asked trying without the battery.
I never used the battery, I won't insert a battery unless I plan on needing a notebook in an area I know there will be no power and I need access to the net. So scratch that.
Anyway so the whole turning off the default wifi and using a usb stick proved useuess as well as it locked up less than 2 hours later. I've returned back to wal-mart as I stated I would. Get this, I checked on their site again just before I've returned it and It's GONE! They removed the listing on their site less than 1 week after I saw it and went and bought it. OH AND.... They dropped the price by $50.00 in that time!!! Sounds like they finally figured out they made a horrible investment and now trying to dump them. They have both models 160GB/250GB HD's and 1GB/2GB RAM side by side at the store for the exact same price $298.00 when I returned it. Only 6 days since I bought mine all this has occurred! I said screw it and went and bought a $499 ASUS (laptop) from bestbuy. I'll buy a netbook when they come out with one comparable to what this Acer promised and failed on. I shall never purchase an ACER again! I look at ppl at the stores looking at them and point and lol. Fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me! Guess what Acer, you don't get a 2nd chance!!!

 

My 751H freezed two times at the first day (last monday). Tuesday morning i see that the battery wasn't locked with the little lockers down of the Acer 751h. So, I locked up and the netbook never freezed more. (sorry for my bad english, I'm brazilian)

Obs: i am using windows XP SP3 with Bios 3206.

 

Hi to everybody. I'm experiencing the freezing bug too, but not as frequently as some of you do.
I'm running an european 751, Ram 1GB & HD 160GB (Seagate). Stock speed because SetFSB doesn't work, just pops up an error I can't remember. Tried every version from latest to .80 without success. It's not a top priority, not on this machine. I get what I want out of it and that's enough. If I OCed, that would have been just for a brief test.
I'm on 7 RTM: since Vista came up, I did never get back to XP, which may be faster, but is also old and very little comfortable to use. (Lore: I have to thank Ubuntu and Packard Bell for switching from XP to Vista, and asap to 7).
Anyway, I think the issue is software related, at least for me. Today LittleMidnight (since my 751 is black) woke up at 12:27:51 pm and has been running till now (2:37 am) without any issue. I surfed the web (Firefox 3.5.3 with lots of extensions), checking email (Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 with some extensions), transfering files from an hard drive to another (internal to external, viceversa and between two externals) and such things.
Crashes appear in two different forms and they don't include the webcam, which is fairly stable. Freeze model A: scenario is trying to run HD videos in MPC-HC (K-Lite CP) with CoreAVC codec and Overlay Mixer renderer, whithout disabling Aero. Screen flickers on and off a few times, mouse stutters, the GMA500 driver crashes and 7 tries to restore it, but if you don't close MPC fast enough the screen goes off and you're 100% stuck (except for long push on powerbutton or interrupting power source). The above mentioned settings are the ones that deliver best performance if Aero is off (you can watch 1080p videos on battery with no fame drops), that's why I use them. Freeze model B is quite random, but happens when using specific apps: Foobar2000 and uTorrent + Peerguardian (I don't know who's the culprit since I always run these two together) cause the issue, sometimes after minutes, sometimes after hours. Without apparent reason, everything suddently hangs: mouse, sound, keyboard, screen. The sound thing makes me believe the CPU enters an infinite loop. Again, the only solution is cutting off power or reset. Anyway, LittleMidnight never hangs while using Office 2007 SP2 or Photoshop CS4 or Photozoom Pro 2.3.2 or Firefox or Thunderbird or Faststone Capture or Faststone Image Viewer. I would suggest to track down which software where you running when the system stopped responding.
To be 100% honest, there is also a freeze model C, which just includes a routine BSOD-and-restart pattern. I don't remember how I provoked them, but I can assure you the GMA500 driver was involved. Probably I got one by starting a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machine with Aero on.
If someone knows if there are and which are the similarities between Foobar and uTorrent/PeerGuardian maybe we can find a key to this mistery.
Last detail, LittleMidnight came with XP Home and BIOS 3206. Windows 7 seems a bit more stable after updating to BIOS 3208. Seems to me that freezes are less frequent.
Bye

 

Howdy fellas,

been a while since my last contribution to this thread. As some of you may remember, I had come up with the idea to disable the "Data Execution Prevention" in order to fix the freezing problem. At least on some systems (including my own) this really did seem to improve the 11.6 incher's stability. But some programs - such as Microsoft Office 2007 - could still lead to a frozen netbook. About a week ago, I promised to give the ACPI approach a try - to find out whether this would finally make us 751 owners cheer up. I didn't get to that, simply because Acer in the meantime released a new BIOS version. At first 3208 looked very promising, but still: Office 2007 would not run stably. So, frankly being quite pissed off, I decided to double check all drivers before disabling the ACPI - which would have been the last thing one could do without actually tempering with the hardware itself. This is when I came across a funny phenomenon: Acer offers an update for the 751's chipset, but this update doesn't actually seem to do anything... all the latest drivers are included, but running the update tool doesn't install them. I then proceeded with manually updating individual drivers - et voilá:

Manually updating both "Intel(R) SCH Family PCI Express Root Port - 8110/8112" and "Intel(R) SCH LPC Interface Controller - 8119" to the latest drivers (version 8.8.0.1001) seems to completely fix the 751. I have not been able to crash my netbook with Office 2007 or with Google Chrome, both of which used to be a sure way to get to the infamous frozen screen. I would encourage all of you to give this a try !

Just in case this does not fix your problem, remember: I am still running Windows XP with the DEP deactivated; I also disabled most acceleration-features of the GMA 500 and "Write Combining" (this does not seem to have ANY effect on the 751's performance, whatever worked before still works now - though I have to add that I never run any games that require these features).

Regards,

DrNo

 

Hello DrNo

where did you get the driver from, is it from acer or intel do you have a link...

 

Acers latest chipset drivers are from May, and already included in my 751, as it was produced in June. I did try to manually update but was prompted that no newer drivers than the one I have was found (8.8.0.1001). :?

I still had freezes as soon as I updated top 3208 but then realized I had not updated the Atheros driver and the VGA driver. These are the only drivers that were released after my 751 was produced. After updating these I had almost 2 days with everything working perfectly (even webcam).

But then downfall came again and freezes were back. :cry:

 

I used the latest driver package provided by Acer, but as I mentioned before: The setup routine included does not install the drivers. You have to download the file (chipset driver 8.8.0.1011, check Acer's download section), unzip it and then manually install the drivers. Simply open the device manager and, for each individual driver, point it to the directory you unzipped the file to. If you're not sure about how to manually update drivers using the device manager, I suggest you ask the omniscient Google-san. I'm sure there are detailed instructions available

Regards,

DrNo

EDIT: @ cmeide --> 8.8.0.1001 is not the latest chipset update available; 8.8.0.1011 is the current version

 

I completely reset my system to the factory settings (per Acer instructions). I ran for a couple of hours without any problem, but today I locked up twice in fairly rapid succession. Once I locked up in Chrome (while scrolling) but the next lock up occurred by simply viewing a page via IE7 (no scrolling). I have the latest drivers and the latest BIOS which simply indicates that Acer has yet to identify the problem.

This is very frustrating.

 

I definitely tried this. Didn't help.

 

I have downloaded the 8.8.0.1011 package. When I try to manually install the 5000XZVP.inf file, it installs but I am still stuck at version 8.8.0.1001.

 

Perhaps this is the reason why (from the readme file contained in the chipset driver download):

************************************************************
* Product: Intel(R) Chipset Device Software
* Release: Production Version
* Version: 8.8.0.1011
* Target Chipset#: Intel(R) SCH Family
* Date: April 02 2008
************************************************************

************************************************************
* 10. IDENTIFYING THE SOFTWARE VERSION NUMBER
************************************************************
The version numbers displayed by Device Manager for a given
device may not be the same as the Intel(R) Chipset Device
Software version.

The correct version number is shown at the top of this file.

 

As soon as I saw this latest theory on fixing the freeze problem, I went to the device manager to see what versions of the mentioned drivers I had, but I could not locate them (albeit I didn't look too long). I then downloaded and installed the chipset drivers using the setup.exe file (which seemed to complete), then saw the mentioned drivers under the system devices, along with their current version numbers: 8.8.0.1001. Also tried a manual device driver update, but Windows said I already had the latest. As I said earlier, I'm not sure if they were there before or not, but I never did install those drivers when I did the clean install of Windows 7 RTM. Before I installed these chipset drivers, I had experienced a freeze almost immediately after trying Google Chrome, so I uninstalled Chrome. I will reinstall it and see if it still freezes. It would be nice if thsi was the fix...

UPDATE: Re-installed Google Chrome. Did lots of scrolling and surfing... Locked up after about 5 minutes (RATS!)

UPDATE 2: I went back to the .1095 GMA 500 driver to see if that helps at all.

 

I am now on page four of the Acer Customer Support Manual - which requests a system restore using recovery disks (which they will send free of charge). I've already sacrificed my personalization and no longer use this system for anything beyond the occasional 5 minutes of web browsing.

I would have been better off with an HP or Dell and sacrificed the 1366x768 resolution and 2GB of RAM. My fear is that this is a permanent incompatibility between chip-level components.

 

COUNCILMAN IVAN DRAGO HAS PUNCHED THIS PROBLEM HARDER THAN THE SUN, HERE IZ HOW:

BASED ON TOP SECRET RESEARCH MADE BY COMRADE DOCTOR NO, SOVIET SUPERMAN DECIDED TO ROLL BACK CHIPSET DRIVER TO MICROSOFT DEFAULTS. NOW COMPUTER STRONG LIKE BLUE OXEN!!

ALL AFTERNOON, DRAGO HAS SPENT FLEXING AND PULSATING HIS PECTORALS IN FRONT OF FABULOUS WEBCAM FOR MADDA RASSIA. NO FREEZE! ROLL BACK CHIPSET DRIVER, IT IZ LIKE SAUNA FOR YOUR MADDA BOARD!!


SALUTE!


/DRAGO

 

Absolutely brilliant post! I would be surprised if the suggestion does much good, but still...absolutely brilliant

 

I returned 751h and got an ASUS EEE 1101HA with nearly same hardware inside.
ASUS also has drivers 8.8.0.1001 installed by default and no freezes. So this is definitely not the cause.