Acer ASPIRE 7720G Audio and Clock Issues

Hey, so pretty much since I got it around seven months ago my Acer's been having trouble playing audio and keeping time. The clock problem's simple: ever since I got it it's lost time at a variable rate, averaging at probably around a minute every hour. Nothing I've done has managed to fix this, except in the short-term by updating it to Internet time.

More complicated have been the audio issues. These vary in severity and come and go to an extent, and I have had some success fixing them. Basically, since I got the computer, audio's been at least slightly choppy while playing videos over a period of time. Generally just playing audio files themselves work fine (unless something resource heavy going on in the background), and bizarrely playing videos through my browser (say on YouTube) has always been perfect, regardless of site, length or quality of video. But when it comes to playing anything from the hard drive regardless of whether it's WMP or VLC and regardless of bit rate, sooner or later the audio screws up. This can be either to the extent that it'll glitch every couple of seconds, that I'll lose sync with the video slightly, or loss of sound entirely. In fact, the first time I downloaded a video podcast on iTunes I was left wondering why the opening scene was so eerily silent for so long!

Now initially I was able to fix this by updating the BIOS to v1.45 and after that pretty much everything was good. It would still glitch occasionally on HD movies, and certainly still didn't like too much going on in the background, but generally nothing I couldn't handle. At least until now, when all the same problems have come back to haunt me worse than ever. I tried going on to v1.43, but no dice. And now I'm back on v1.45 in the vain hope that re-installing it might make some difference. But alas. I've looked at performance in task manager and it's ticking along at about 16% CPU usage, so nothing untoward there either. It seems like a BIOS problem because updating the BIOS fixed it, but now it's screwing up again under that same BIOS and with nothing untoward going on in the background or hitting the CPU too hard I'm totally stumped.

Basically, is there anything else I might try software wise, or is it time to give Acer a call while I'm still in warranty?

Cheers.

 

This has been driving me even more mad recently because there just doesn't seem to be any pattern to when it messes up. Sometimes I can have loads of stuff running in the background and it'll be fine, other times I might have just rebooted the machine and it'll be horrendous. When playing videos through iTunes, it's fairly predictable that the higher resolution videos experience more issues (although sometimes an entire HD episode of Lost will be perfect). Yet right now I'm playing an avi at below 640x480 through VLC and it's stuttering like never before. I just think if I can find a pattern to it I'll at least be able to minimise the problem, until I can send it off for repair when my college course finishes... Any ideas?

Also, is there any chance of Acer releasing another BIOS any time soon?

 

Hi, is it 16% with a task running, at idle it should be 1-2%. Also which video card has your 7720 got? However it should not be losing time, is this when it is switched off or when it is on. Either way it sounds like you do need to send it in..
Chris

 

Hey, right now with no tasks running it's fluctuating between around 2 and 9%, running the video pushes that up to between 4 and 16%. The video card's a NVIDA GeForce 9300M G.

As for the time issue, it's constant, but again tends to fluctuate with how quickly it loses time. I recently noticed since I've been watching a lot of videos on it lately, that doing so seems to slow the clock down even more, so for instance it lost about 2 minutes while idle overnight, but since re-calibrating it, I've lost about 7 minutes in the last few hours.

 

Hi again, I assume you've run a virus scanner, there is a known virus called slow clock. Somethings running in the backround as your cpu usage shouldn't fluctuate by that amount when idling, mine goes between 0-1%...
Chris

 

Hey, wasn't aware of that, but yeah, have run avast numerous times including a full system scan last night. To be honest, because it's been like this since I got it, I think I'm just going to have to take it back, but just thought I'd see if there's anything at all that could be done. Cheers for your help anyway

 

Upgrade your BIOS to version 1.45 to fix your clock problem. I used to suffer from both these issuues too.