2 POS notebooks, requesting advice (Aspire 5024 and TM 5720)

Hi there -

I'm about at the end of my rope with Acer. First, I bought an Aspire 5024 in December 2005. I needed something portable, and as powerful as possible for some video project, but I was also on a tight budget. The Aspire seemed to have decent specs, and it was the best value notebook I found. I had nothing but problems with it, however, as it was plagued with an overheating problem that kept it from performing at its maximum (the CPU would throttle down to 44% upon hitting 84º C to keep itself from burning up, making 3D rendering a PITA, and gaming impossible). I had to send it back to Acer 4 times for repair, and each time they were unable to fix the problem. On the 4th time, they replaced it with a TravelMate 5720.

Now, the TM functions as it should with one small hitch; it crashes a lot. In fact, in the 30 or so days that I've owned the computer, I've had 15 instances of the BSOD, and 67 application crashes. It shipped with Acer's own version of Vista Home Prem, which was problematic, so I formatted the drive and tried a crapware free clean install, which had also yielded nothing but problems. I could try XP, but that's beside the point. It shipped with Vista, so it should be stable under Vista. I don't want to waste another couple of days installing XP only to find that it still crashes.

So what would you all do in this situation? Lemme know if you need any additional info. Ultimately, I would like just to have a full refund of my original purchase price so I could go get another non-Acer PC, but I doubt that's too likely. Any advice would be appreciated.

- Justin

 

Give XP a try

 

is you laptop stock config ? have you add any ram ?

Run Memory check it cound be some simple bad ram

Does is crash in spefic program or all the time you can use debug tools to check what is cause the crash

 

clean install of xp solved my problems.my aspire was shipped with vista home but i had the option to roll back xp pro media centre.then i used a cooling pad as the heat issue was a worry.
and remove the Acer bloatware

 

Not sure if you guys understand what I'm getting at. If Acer makes a computer that overheats, that's not my fault; it's Acer's fault. I'm not going to jump through any hoops to get it working the way they told me it would (i.e., a cooling pad, underclocking, etc). Likewise, if they ship me a machine that's loaded with Vista, I expect it to run Vista. It's not my responsibility to waste my own time in installing XP, Linux, or whatever else. Having heard some of your responses though, I can easily see how Acer gets away with producing shoddy machines.

FYI, the computer is stock, as they sent it to me from the factory (hardware-wise), but I did reformat the hard drive and install Vista fresh. I'm going to install XP on a different partition in order to be able to get some work done (unless it still crashes under XP, which is likely) while I negotiate my refund with Acer.

- Justin

P.S. - Vista's memory test didn't return any errors, and event viewer hasn't given me any consistent idea of what's causing the problem. I feel like I'm playing Whack-a-Mole in troubleshooting this machine (i.e. - doing someone at Acer's job).

 

Try diffent Memory test such a gold memoery

Acer is usely good fix they problem if you got crash dump file send me it post some where i can open debug tools see what it say is causeing the issues

what are you doing when it crash?

 

Where can I find the crash dump file? I'll post it if I can find it...

- Justin

 

C:\windows\minidumps

you also have make sure you seting are right in advanced system seting to make dump files

in vista right click my computer hit properties
then advanced system seting on the side bar
then pick system and startup

make sure you have uncheck automaitcly restart

make sure you write debug info is on kernel memory debug

they diffent type you might want start with small dump file but it might not be enogh info in to full debug

then you can also complete kernel dump

but it will much biger file
make sure over write debug file is unchecked