Need more help from some techies...

[Astroman]

Hi all,

Well to continue with my round of bad luck. My wife and I went out on the 9th and purchased an Acer Aspire A80 Computer. Yesterday on the 11th it stopped working (2days old). I will give you a run down on what happened.

I was surfing the redbull air race website and the screen halted, I could see the mouse but I cannot remember if it could move. Anyway I turned off the computer as it was the only was to restart. (ctrl-alt-del didnt work) On startup the CD drive flashed for a few seconds then went out. At the same time the power LED just kept flashing on and off.

I tried resetting, turning off the power at the wall and removing the drives, but still it would not boot up.

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

if I cannot get some sort of answer today I will be calling Acer service for waranteee repair.

[Dennis]

On my IBM ThinkPad when a “won’t re-boot” problem occurred, after turning off the mains power I removed the battery pack, waited 30 secs, re-inserted it, plugged in the mains connector and the system re-booted.

Cheers

Dennis

[acropolite]

Hmm, I had a mate with a similar experience with an HP PC, requiring first a HDD change, then a M/B and HDD change, and several reloads; he still has problems. Seems to me that the big MFG's are cutting corners on quality to keep the price down. If it were me I would be asking for a refund, then building a machine from scratch using a well respected motherboard such as ASUS or Gigabyte.

[Astroman]

Okay thanks guys for the replies, I think I may have figured it out. I went out and bought a new computer, installed the old hard drive from the other computer into it for more space and the same thing happened. Either I have one hell of a virus on the hard drive or the drive is buggered. I took the drive out of the new computer and left it for a day, turned it on and it is working fine now. So I will be getting a new HDD for the old computer and trying it out.

[g__day]

Andrew, do you use line filters, line conditioners or uninterruptible power supplies (UPS - which have both plus surge protection and battery back-up) for your PC gear?

If your area gets dirty power it won't help sensitive electronic gear.

PC Hardware faults most often stem from

1. Low quality power supply
2. Low quality electrical signal
3. Poor quality hard drive cables
4. Case overheating CPU or GPU
5. Faulty on/off switch
6. Low quality motherboards
7. Poor quality memory with or memory SIMMs with mixed timings
8. Dying hard drives
9. Suppling too much or too little power to your CPU / GPU (voltage regualtors on your motherboard

The best way to avoid these are:

1. Bigger, better PSU - try Topower or Antec in the 400W to 800W range
2. UPS - a 800VA UPS retails for under $250
3. Inspect and buy SATA or round IDE cables that appear in good condition
4. Add fans and/or put a bigger, better heat sink / cooler on your CPU
5. Rare but definitely causes wierd crashes by shorting the 5V rail and causing power fades - costs 50 cents to replace
6. Buy ABIT, ASUS or TYAN
7. Try Corsair or Geil
8. Seagate are my favourites for years
9. A good motherboard and PSU solves this.

[jase]

I second g__day's comments. May also want to verify the drive is being correctly identified in the BIOS. Perhaps flash it.