Acer laptop issue

[wasp]

Mornin!

I have an Acer Travelmate 5720 which I bought in December '07 and its died a horrible death and I cannot work out why. I went to my acer centre to sort it but was told 5-7 days and despite warranty, would still have to pay if it was my fault. Before going through another indie company to fix it or go back to Acer, I thought I'd try and sort it myself.

The laptop boots up and then within 3 minutes, the mouse freezes and I have to shut it down and re-start it via the off button (changed by default to turn laptop off).

The only things installed within 2 weeks of the problem was openoffice.org and a program called bigclock I got from download.com. Removed the clock since but no help.

I think I'm buggered really but any one any ideas......??

 

[ammo]

system restore

Mornin!



I think I'm buggered really but any one any ideas......??

you can go into accessories,system restore, set it back to a previous date when it was working and try that ,it should be self explanatory when you get into sys restore...good luck

 

[wasp]

Ahh, no such luck, my most recent restore point is too recent! I don't have any back up discs nor saved any onto the back up drive thingy on the laptop as I was attempting to save space!

When it does last more than 2 minutes, I just get the blue screen of death now!

 

[wasp]

In fact, all I get at the moment is wallpaper and toolbar, then hear a couple of clicks and the good old BSOD!

 

[ammo]

In fact, all I get at the moment is wallpaper and toolbar, then hear a couple of clicks and the good old BSOD!

if you no any programmers, software engineers, they probably have a copy of windos xp,and can reboot it for you, mine went down on jan 29 and thats what i did, took 2 hours, gave the guy $50,you could go to the store and buy a second one and use the disc to reload your first one, keep the second one for backup, or return it.

 

[wasp]

does anyone have vista and can check on dwm.exe please? Its showing as the largest running process but I don't remember seeing it there before...

Stopped that, didn't help

 

[nine]

Wasp, does Vista have a "Safe Mode" start up option?

If it does then you should be able to start up under that and perhaps find the fault or alternatively backup your existing data files. If it doesn't and you want to back up those files then let me know and I'll suggest some CD bootable software that will let you do that independently of Vista - then you can make a stay or go decision about vista.

 

[wasp]

Yeah tried the safe mode but again, it loads then freezes within a minute or two. I don't think I can do anything myself, I'll have to get someone to take a look at it... Apple may be the future...

 

[Lightning McQueen]

mate at work has one of those lappers, the operating system if I recall is sat on a hidden partition and on startup you should have an option to reinstall the main operating system on the c drive and reset everything to factory settings, check out the options you have on startup - should have got a dell :cheesy:

just checked my main pc and on startup I have to do F11 to start the recovery manager to do a factory reset, you did burn the system partition backup when asked to didn't you ???

 

[foredog]

my acer does that, i think it's becasue of all the updates, microsoft, norton etc, but i think it's ALT & f10 for the ACER recovery tool, then you can reset to factory settings from there, it's all stored on the D: drive so no reboot disks

 

[gedward3]

Lightning why do you recommend Dell Laptop. Ive just purchased an £800 Sony and swiftly sent that back as the build was terrible and Vista was crap. Ive now narrowed it down to a Toshiba or a dell with both about the same Chips and RAM etc. Both ranging from £450 to £550.
Was just interested as to why you think Dell are good.

Cheers

mate at work has one of those lappers, the operating system if I recall is sat on a hidden partition and on startup you should have an option to reinstall the main operating system on the c drive and reset everything to factory settings, check out the options you have on startup - should have got a dell :cheesy:

just checked my main pc and on startup I have to do F11 to start the recovery manager to do a factory reset, you did burn the system partition backup when asked to didn't you ???

 

[shadowninja]

Mine did this. I thought it was because I stopped a defrag halfway through. I understand that a recent Microsoft update can cause PCs to fail to reboot. Genius.

 

[Lightning McQueen]

Lightning why do you recommend Dell Laptop. Ive just purchased an £800 Sony and swiftly sent that back as the build was terrible and Vista was crap. Ive now narrowed it down to a Toshiba or a dell with both about the same Chips and RAM etc. Both ranging from £450 to £550.
Was just interested as to why you think Dell are good.

Cheers

Hi gedward3
I have 2 dell laptops the oldest one is way past its tech life at 13 years old windows 95 ...crash! crash! crash! other than that still going strong.

The other one is an 11 year old win98 work horse that until xmas I used as my T2W browser/pdf reader and general net trawler, still works fine although its slow as you would expect for its age, just manages to draw a finspreads chart - eventually :clap:

and they are both still recognized & supported on the dell website

the laptops at work are dell, they just seem to go on and on for ever, good build quality you see.

I laugh at mates at work whose cheap lappers go t!ts up after 18 months or so with bits falling off em, I just wind them up with a thumbs up and saying "Taiwans finest!"

1st stop for me just before buying my new pc was the dell website, see what lappers & towers they had, was after a replacement tower, didn't like the dell ones, so went down pc world and got a compaq and chuffed to bits with it I am

got loads of cash? check out the precision lappers on the dell business site, that's what I'm saving for, awesome kit.

anyway good hunting

BTW How's it going wasp, any luck yet ?

 

[midnight*trader]

it's only 2 months old dont let acer fob you off , but yeah as foredog has said theres a built in recovery system ,keep tapping f10 and alt key on boot up.

 

[wasp]

Well, back to Acer as I ran the internal built in Acer recovery program and the result was.......

Root cause found:
-----------------------------------------------
System volume on disk is corrupt.

Repair action: File system repair (chkdsk)
Result: Completed Succesfully. Error code = 0x0
Time Taken = 130339 ms
-----------------------------------------

what grabs me is that I can run all these checks etc without a problem but 2 mins into the normal boot up it freezes so have I let a virus through somewhere?

 

[ammo]

Well, back to Acer as I ran the internal built in Acer recovery program and the result was.......

Root cause found:
-----------------------------------------------
System volume on disk is corrupt.

Repair action: File system repair (chkdsk)
Result: Completed Succesfully. Error code = 0x0
Time Taken = 130339 ms
-----------------------------------------

what grabs me is that I can run all these checks etc without a problem but 2 mins into the normal boot up it freezes so have I let a virus through somewhere?

sounds like there was one attatched to bigclock,maybe an ad on there site had a bug in it

 

[firewalker99]

Mornin!

I have an Acer Travelmate 5720 which I bought in December '07 and its died a horrible death and I cannot work out why. I went to my acer centre to sort it but was told 5-7 days and despite warranty, would still have to pay if it was my fault. Before going through another indie company to fix it or go back to Acer, I thought I'd try and sort it myself.

The laptop boots up and then within 3 minutes, the mouse freezes and I have to shut it down and re-start it via the off button (changed by default to turn laptop off).

The only things installed within 2 weeks of the problem was openoffice.org and a program called bigclock I got from download.com. Removed the clock since but no help.

I think I'm buggered really but any one any ideas......??

Have you tried booting the laptop without the battery? With only the power adapter connected to it?

I know this might seem unrelated, but two months ago my nephew got a very similar problem. Oddly enough the battery caused the whole issue! After looking for hours into a possible software configuration issue or interrupt conflict, somehow a defunct battery caused all the lock-ups, freezes and crashes.

Not sure if this is the case with your PC though, but as it happens it was an Acer Travelmate too...

As for the warranty, I'm not sure if they are allowed to charge you anything though. How could it be your fault, unless you've dropped it or something like that?

 

[foredog]

Cheers Firewalker, just tried that on mine, took battery off and it rebooted all fine, weird, only time will tell. Did your nephew get a new battery or just cope without?

 

[wasp]

Good to hear foredog, unfortunately not for me. Booted and can move the mouse but click on start and nothing... Can't ctrl, alt + del or anything still....

 

[firewalker99]

Cheers Firewalker, just tried that on mine, took battery off and it rebooted all fine, weird, only time will tell. Did your nephew get a new battery or just cope without?

Nice! It's very weird though. My nephew's laptop was unfortunately out of warranty, it was one of the older Travelmate models, but looks like the newer ones suffer from a similar problem. Strange thing.

Anyway, getting himself an original battery replacement from Acer wasn't worth the trouble. The price tag was around 170 EUR while Acer sells new laptops from 399 EUR. Imagine that So he's just using his laptop as a back-up desktop replacement now, it still works perfectly, you just need to have the power connected at all times.