Acer Aspire One Freeze shortly after startup

[Marf]

My brothers back from Uni this weekend and I'm trying to sort out his netbook for him tonight before he goes back tomorrow.

It will freeze shortly after startup, can be a couple of minutes after, can be 10 minutes after.

When it freezes you generally get a sustained system beep.

I've tried disabling startup items, booting in safe mode(with and without networking) and it keeps happening.

Found a forum where a guy fixed it by disabling the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery, tried that but nothing, still happens.

Beginning to think its a hardware issue rather than a software issue? Possibly RAM related, but I doubt it would run long enough to run memtest.

[Bugeyeandy]

What OS are you running? My Aspire one failed to boot up at all one day after working perfectly the previous day.

A fresh install of the Bios fixes a lot of maladies with these little machines. Certainly sorted mine out!

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_o...

Choose the highest number of BIOS and download.

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f...

Update instructions.

[Marf]

Its running XP32 Home. I'll try updating the bios, I'm a little wary about doing it though in case it freezes mid install.

[Bugeyeandy]

Might be worth checking the BIOS version you already have first and seeing if it's already the latest since your worried.

Also before you try that, install this program

http://www.computentsystems.de/aceraspireonefancon...

and see what your temps are doing, might be getting hot? With this program you can make the fan come on at whatever temp you like so you can make it run cooler all the time.

You can update the BIOS on startup a different way too, i'll have a dig around and see if I can find the instructions.

[Bugeyeandy]

Here we go

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer-aspire-one...

Worked a treat for me, recovered my dead aspire one and it's been perfect and crash free ever since.

[Marf]

Thanks for your help so far Andy.

BIOS version was 31xx, just upgraded it to the latest which was 33xx.

So far no crashes. I've stuck speedfan on there and am running a defrag whilst monitoring temps.

Seeing

HD0 45c
Temp1 52c
Core0 48c
Core1 48c

So nothing excessive really.

So far its not crashed and defrag has been running for over 10 minutes, so hopefully updating the BIOS has sorted it

[Bugeyeandy]

Fingers crossed

Have a look over at http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/ , loads of good info on there.

[Marf]

And its crashed

I'll have a search through the forums, see if theres a fix.

Pretty much sure its hardware now though

[Bugeyeandy]

Damn