Dead aspire one

Mine died this morning! Had added 1GB of 533MHz DRAM (Dane-elec) about 5 days ago. It had worked fine up until now. Took it to the Acer service centre this morning. I am hoping that by installing memory I have not invalidated the warranty. However if they are difficult about this I will can claim that I have over 30 years in the electronics industry and have done many computer upgrades during this time. The woman at the service centre in the Netherlands said they had had 3 other AA1s in for repair at their centre (although didn't indicate whether it was for the same problem).

Looking through the posts it doesn't seem to me that this is memory related. The AA1 should start to boot even with a malfunctioning (or missing) DRAM. A number of posters have reported malfunctions without installing extra memory. It seems to me that either the Atom processor is dying or else something on the motherboard.

 

Well, leaving out the batteries overnight did not bring my One back to life. :cry: I'm typing this on my new One, which hopefully fares better. To remind everyone, my dead One is totally factory stock (A150, 120GB HDD, 1GB), and died while trying to restore Linpus from a USB key. It hung during initial POST, which forced me to power off, then never came back.

In my 20 years of working with countless computers of all types, I have never EVER seen a brand new machine die like this. Heck, even very old computers will still run with new batteries and drives.

I have a feeling that the BIOS is to blame for the self-destruct. My dead One came from the factory with InsydeH2O version 0.3114 (what's this mean, is it beta?) as did this One. My wife's SSD model still has the older BIOS, and it's still working. Of course, this is just one case, but I'm still curious if v0.3114 is to blame.

Acer better come out with a fix quick, as we paid good money for a computer that should last longer than a week!

Thoughts?

 

Mine also, AOA110 died with 0.3114 BIOS. So, 0.3114 have self destruction code

 

How did it die? During boot, or did it just not turn on one day? The details might help track this critical problem down...

 

My unmodded one has died yesterday, called acer and they will repair/replace my 110. It dies at about 70% battery left. I let my one on a whole night after in blanked. Then removed the battery, booted linpus and it all seemed fine. Now i'm on XP again and it's not going over 70% again. I will try the same trick i used with linpus tonight.

 

Mine died right after restoring the original SO with an external DVD player, connected via USB. After the recovery, the PC rebooted and no image could be seen. After that, it is just like others have described, power led on with a blank (black) screen.

Marcel

 

It appears that it may be a BIOS problem after all - maybe we need to downgrade?

 

Playing a while on Linpus. Upgrade the BIOS to 0.3114 and then installing full XP SP3 using USB Flash. Some modification to speed up XP, including uxtheme patch for 3rd party theme. Installing Office 2003 and AVG Free 8, using my AOA110 for 3 days. In the next day, offline update AVG and then reboot. First reboot success but the second reboot, died! Sorry for my English.

 

I wonder if this is related to the Bios upgrade to v .3114? I upgraded about a week ago. Has anyone had their One self destruct running with the 3109 BIOS?

 

Decided to upgrade the BIOS since sometimes my AA1 power LED keep ON after power OFF. Sometimes, not always. Now, I miss my AA1 because have seen 1.8" Toshiba 30GB ZIF last night.

 

I wanted to let everyone know that my 2nd Aspire One died too. I had two XP 120GB machines one modified with an additional 1GB stick and other bone stock. I believe there's a ongoing problem with these laptops which I'm not willing to take a chance on any further. I asked the Microcenter service tech about returns and he claimed he's returned 5 already, they've had them 1 week! They all were returned with the same problem as mine (dead after reboot).

MP

 

Please do not reboot your AA1
I think it's time to make a petition to Acer!

 

Blackhawk don't worry about your English. It is very clear!!

Seems to me that this might well be Bios related. Proabably the most tech savvy uses are the ones that could figure out how to upgrade Ram etc and these would also know how to upgrade the Bios (Acer don't make it easy ;-). It is probably pure coincidence that in several cases the One died several days after the DRAM was upgraded.

Can we find out exactly what Acer changed in the Bios?

 

Mine also died trying to reboot! Maybe this is the key factor!

This would suggest that there is something in the way the One powers down/up that causes it to fail.

I have noticed that there are some folks reporting an intermittent failure. This might help to pin down the source of the problem.

It would also be good to know if what OS & Bios was running at the time of failure.

In my case I had v0.3114 Bios with Win/XP.

 

@Achilles
Thank you.

From the BIOS changelog we can read about operating system check. In my condition, the keyword is: Windows XP, BIOS 0.3114, and warm boot (boot without memory check). Cold boot can not fix the problem.

 

If this is a bios issue then I would think that resetting the on board battery would have no effect since the bios is presumably in EEPROM.

 

Very interesting!! To my mind there is a lot of commonality about the problems that we have experienced. This implies that the problem is systematic rather than being random. It doesn't mean that all machines will necessarily fail but that there is a heightened risk when used under certain conditions. To my mind the three possible factors are:

1). Memory: No upgrade vs 533 or 667MHz
2). Bios: v3109 vs v3114
3). OS: Linux vs WIn XP/Vista

A fourth possibility is that the malfunction occurred because e.g. the memory upgrade was not done in a proper way (heaven knows they made it difficult enough!). However in most case the failure occurred several days after the upgrade (which is not indicative of problems such as ESD that might have been the result of poor installation). Also, some users have reported failure without making any changes. Also failures have been reported when no memory upgrade has been made. Personally I can't see how the choice of OS can make any difference since this isn't detected until the Bios has reported.

The other possiblity is of course is that it is completely unrelated to any of the above!

 

Another thought is that whether or not other netbooks/SCCs using the Intel Atom chipset have experienced similar problems as this would be indicative of a more generic problem with this particular chipset. I had a quick look at one of the EEE901 forums and did see some mention of screens blacking out but didn't seem to tally exactly with our experiences.

Also checked out the MSI/Wind but no reports there. Probably this is specific to the AA1 although I will look into this further.

 

I'm wondering if there is anyone we can contact on the technical side at Acer. Talked to the Service people but they aren't very clued up. However I assume that there is someone at Acer responsible for QA. They must be aware (surely!!) of this issue.

 

BIOS silently check the hardware and the operating system (if have ability to do it) before showing POST message. Check the booting counter, increase it if necessary:

Code:

if counter > x then
goto died

Ha..ha..ha... Keep smile even in frustrate situation