8204: BSOD when power-up on batteries!

I wonder if anyone has experienced this. I have just reinstalled XP-SP2 on my 8204, with all the latest drivers. One odd thing i noticed is that when I try to power-up when using batteries (not plugged-in), a blue screen appears just before the welcome sign-in screen, then it restarts itself, over and over again. Soon as I plug the AC adapter, it boots normally.

Any thoughts?

 

What ATI driver did you install, I think I read messages that the 6.10 or 6.11 driver cause this problem while on battery.

 

Omega 38291 driver. It's only been a few days since I reinstalled everything, so I haven't tried powering-up on batteries with ACER's 8231 driver.

 

Oh, I haven't tried drivers from ATI's website cause I read it doesn't work with the 8204.

 

omega drivers seem to cause a lot of problems with random rebooting. this happened with my desktop, and is a noted issue for the asus w3j. i would go back to the stock display drivers.

 

Are you referring to version 8231? Are you currently using this as well? I'll probably let it be until weekend comes, as I try to gather more information on it. Thanks.

 

Okay, first things first, you need to disable automatic reboot after BSOD, I HATE that microsoft has this as standard because it is really hard to diagnose any problems (and even if you can talk to someone in technical support being able to say "yeah it reboots after a blue screen as soon as I do this" they can't help much.

To disable

Open Control Panel -> System -> Advanced Tab

Under Startup and Recovery click on the Settings tab
Under System Failure uncheck the box that says "Automatically restart"

Now if it happens all the time it's easy to just restart on battery power, note what the BSOD actually states as the issue file or whatever, and report back and we might be able to help more.

 

OK, here's what it says on the blue screen (apart from the rest) :
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

It immediately went into blue screen as soon as I unplugged the power.

 

Okay, a couple of things to try (after trying each, confirm whether it still BSOD's).

1. Simple quick check, remove the DVD drive from the PC (I found I had to pull the "unplug" switch quite hard, and plug it back in.

2. Get the latest version of Memtest86+ from here http://www.memtest.org/, run that and check your memory is okay.

3. Presumably it doesn't list any drivers or anything, so try the last set of graphics drivers from the Acer site as opposed to Omega, alternatively try the Omega 3.8.273, I KNOW for a fact these work because that's what I'm running, and I know that some later ones did have some issues (can't recall what now, but one of the issues was some sort of BSOD if I recall).

 

The latest omega drivers have caused problems for lots of people. I'm still running the 8.2 versions and it's been flawless.



Try these versions after running driver cleaner.

 

I had the same problem myself. It's an issue with the Omega's. Use 273's (Catalyst 6.7's) if you want to keep using Omega's. Else use the newer Catalyst drivers from ATI. Catalyst 6.10 was the latest stable driver for my 8204 for some reason. 6.9, 6.11, and 6.12 would all fail to initialize the video adapter after resuming from standby.

 

I've decided to take the short cut as it seems it is the Omega driver that's causing the problem, so I uninstalled driver related items in the Add/Remove panel and then reinstalled Acer's 8231 package. All is well so far, can run on batteries again. Haven't the chance to search for the previous Catalyst versions so it's back to the basic this time.
Thanks everyone for their help!