Tuesday 7 July 2009

Death and life of a netbook (Acer Aspire One)

I've got an acer aspire one
This isn't really a review but ever since i've got it, its been great. Small, light, perfect for travelling and storing photos on, its been round the world with us.

I really don't have a bad word to say about it, the Intel atom 1.6 GHz processor is great and the 1 gig of ram perfect for running xp home (yes sorry i had to get the Microsoft XP version, i did really want the linux one, but it wasn't just me using it and everyone else knows xp so xp it was), and the 160gig HD is perfect for storing the photos on.

small, fast, strong, light, good looking
all good praise
so why the post?

well it broke, i didn't do anything to it, didn't install anything nasty, didn't mess with its innards (i know better than to do that to a perfectly good working laptop) but it broke. i shut it down one day, proper full shut down (not hibernation or sleep) and that was it, next time i pressed the power button nothing happened, no splash screen, no BIOS info, just a black screen :-/ eek.

Well after searching the interweb it appears it happens now and again to this perfect specimen of a nettop laptop. luckily there were some instructions on how to fix it too :-) thank god for google...

I wont go into details here, see the link below, i just thought id better let other unfortunates know that sometimes a dead laptop isn't really dead. i was dreading sending it back to the manufactures though...

Detailed instructions here
http://www.qrpcw.com/2009/01/acer-aspire-one-bios-recovery.html

Download BIOS update from here
http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_one_150.html

happy days
now don't do that again. Speaking of which, if anyone knows why this happens could you let us know, im worried it might happen again, proper backups from now on then...