I have a strange theory.

[Old Man River]

I have a strange theory.

I bought me a new Acer Aspire AS5002LMi-XPP Turion 64 NoteBook just before Christmas.
I had just turned it on when this message came up immediately. ?This system has recovered from a serious error.? Got the death notice from Microsoft notifying me, ?Unspecified error!?, and a box below it with an ?Ok? inside. The only way I could stop the constant stream of small windows was to task the Windows Task Manager (Control, Alt, Delete) where I found the CPU was quite busy. Microsoft blamed an overheated CPU, bad Memory sticks, and overheating.

I called Acer and they told me I had contacted a virus. I hadn?t had time to even go to the Internet yet.

It has an AMD Turion 64 Mobile MT30 Lancaster 800MHz FSB 1MB L2 Cache Socket 754 Processor and 512 Mb of ram. I felt a lot of heat coming out before I shut it down. This processor is noted to run cool.

Anyway, I would turn it on and off several times since then and suddenly the problem went away!

Is that what is called burning it in? Should we expect some problems would go away after time?

Stupid question, I know...but - - I?m scratching my head and beginning to wonder.

I?d like to stick a gig of ram in there and replace the HD with a faster and cooler Seagate HD and I will probably have that done in town at a computer repair place I trust.

 

[unfalliblekrutch]

i don't know what the problem was, but to be safe, you probably want to RMA it

 

[Jeff7]

Yeah. Power-cycling won't fix anything.

"Burn in" as it concerns computers refers to a time during which the computer's various components are pushed to their limits to cause any problems to manifest themselves. The burn-in process doesn't make the computer work better, or fix problems. It's intended to find problems before they happen when you're doing something important.

Basically, a computer straight from the factory, right out of the box, should not crash. Period.

 

[Pciber]

This is why I don't like Acer laptops - problems like this, and less than superb battery life, even with a turion or pentium-m.

 

[Old Man River]

I know, but several people on getting this had misled me. I thought Acer was a real good Laptop. I plan on getting an extra gig of ram and replacing that slow HD with another, preferably a Seagate. I hope this can be done.

 

[Hard Ball]

The Turion Acers have distinct quality differences between the Ferrari line and the Travelmate line. For real quality, you probably would want to go with the Ferrari series.

If you want to save some dough, you might want to check out MSI 1036, which a lot people are giving raving reviews about, even though it's only been available for a short time.

I have seen the problem that you are describing a number of times; usually it is caused by an incorrect BIOS setting in memory timing, that is not compatible with the SPD of the modules. Sometime it would be caused by faulty BIOS revisions, or simply sloppiness of the OEM in setting BIOS up in the first place; and physically resetting BIOS (with jumpers), and then manually entering the CL, tRP, tRCD, and tRAS according to the SPD of the stick of memory would usually fix it. I'm not sure if that is possible for your laptop.

Alternatively it could also be CPU or RAM overheating. If CPU is overheating, and it was caused by improper application of TIM (thermal grease, thermal pad, etc), i.e. the contact area created by the thermal material is not sufficient; there is a chance that thermal material will spread out due to heating during the first a few times that you use it.

 

[Liver]

Demons, call a priest.

Prime overnight?