RIP Acer One
 

Well, the little Acer One that has been my travel companion since October 2008 is dead. After putting it into sleep mode this afternoon it would not restart -- get a green light on the power button, and the fan sounds like it's running, but there is no indication of hard drive activity (no light), and nothing on the screen.

I have an e-mail into Acer Support. Man, it's a hassle to lose all of the stuff on the hard drive.

Has anyone else suffered reliability problems with these little machines? I've been very pleased with this up to this point.

I feel your pain, about two weeks ago my old but incredibly sturdy Lenovo just stopped working. I would press the power button, absolutely nothing happened. Tried everything and it's just dead.

So I bought a Dell 1525.

Unless you encrypted the hard drive, likely you can still get the data off.

Not exactly sure how customizable these are though is there any way you can open the thing up and maker sure the hard drive and everything else is seated properly. I would think you could start a computer without a hard drive, obviously you couldn't get too far though you should at least see the BIOS screen, right? Isn't that on a separate chip.

There's a trick that works with other laptop brands sometimes - worth a try. 1) Disconnect power cord and remove battery. 2) Push and hold the power-on button for at least a minute to dissipate any stored charge. 3) Connect power cord without battery and try to power up. 4) If successful, insert battery.

I'm not sure of the technical reasons this works, I just know it often does the trick. Good luck.

Mine is from November, and working like a champ through several international and domestic trips, most recently ended yesterday. Coupled with Boingo, it's been a great addition to trips.

Cheers.

Yep, the Acer Tech Support folks had me try that one. No joy, so it's winging its way to Temple, TX right now for repairs. I'll miss the little guy. Hope to get it back before my next trip in 10 days.

Did you reseat the memory and the hard drive? this also often does the trick.

HTSC

Mine continues to work like a champ. I love this little thing. First int'l trip is next week but gobs of domestic trips since late November have been a joy. So far two drops and a sit on but no damage AFAIK.

Quick question and hopefully not too OT: anyone notice and know how to repair the fact that the wireless works a lot slower when running on the battery than when plugged in? I hate keeping it plugged in all the time as that will wear by battery down but at times it just sooooo slow running of the battery that I give in and plug it back in. When I do that it starts to fly again.

Anyone else experience this?

I've not experienced this at all.

Also, I believe that, with Lithium Ion batteries, the "keeping it plugged in causes the battery to die faster" is no longer true. I keep all of my laptopns plugged in when power is handy.

Cheers.

The Acer Ones can take additional memory, but only up to 1.5 gig. Installing it is not for faint-of-heart, as it requires disassembly of a considerable part of the machine. I've seen a number of modifications, including installation of a wireless card, a touch screen, an internal Bluetooth adapter and several other things. These, however, are not off-the-shelf additions and require some skill with a soldering iron.

One word - BACKUP. Should your laptop especially the HD give up the ghost it may be a while to get the data. I know it is a pain but backup on a regular basis.

I haven't seen that, but look in the power management settings on the wireless NIC. By default it is in "maximum" power save mode. I leave mine like that and it seems OK to me but you can adjust it and see if it helps things.

That is the procedure to reset the bios on most laptops.

Strange -- this just happened to me today. I haven't bothered with emailing Acer. I just got a repair authorization and shipped it off to them 2-day UPS.

I hope this isn't an indication of things to come. I really love this little machine.