Acer Aspire 5102 freezing and screen showing vertical lines on battery power

Hi,

I have a two year old Acer Aspire 5102. Recently, when I use the battery for power, the computer would just freeze.Or it would show vertical bands of different colours, like sometimes it would be blue and white, or green and white. Or it would just show a pure white screen.
This happened once or twice over the past two years, but in the last week, it has become a regular occurrence on battery power. Now I don't use the laptop without it being on AC power. Could it be the battery thats being screwy? In any case, I always have to do a hard reboot by holding the power button for a few seconds.

Anyone know what it could be and how to solve it? Thanks.
By the way, I upgraded my laptop recently to 4gb of RAM.

 

does this ever occur without battery power??

try hooking up AC power and REMOVE THE BATTERY... see if the problem ever occurs..

it sounds to me like a battery that is getting OLD and causing problems...
my guess is a new battery will solve the problem,, but first test and see if you can duplicate the problem with out the battery installed... if you can then it's not the battery!!

 

The color lines problem you are experiencing has always been a problem with the aspire 5100 series. I have been told that it is mainboard issue and acer have released several bios fixes in the last year to try and "fix" the problem however nothing seems to work. I personally haven't seen the color lines in almost a year now but as you have noticed it happens at random and the only way to unfreeze the notebook is to do a hard shutdown.

What you can try doing (if you haven't already) is upgrading your 5100 to the latest bios available for it. The latest version is 3.13.

 

Hi,

The computer does not freeze on AC power, nor has it ever. The only time I can think of when it did freeze on AC power was when the airflow vent was blocked by a few books and the computer overheated and the screen went white. Other than that, under normal circumstances, it has never froze.

One more thing though. The ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 is 128MB by standard. After upgrading the BIOS to 3.xx after I installed the RAM to 4GB, i went into the BIOS setup and changed the settings from 128MB to 256MB. I know that the memory is shared so I figured it will just draw more memory from the 4GB.

This is when the computer started freezing frequently. I mean 100% of the time, the laptop would freeze sooner or later when on battery power. I figured that the laptop could not handle the 256mb on battery power and I went into BIOS and changed it back to 128. I quit the menu, and low and behold, my computer wouldn't start... The HDD light was lit up, the CD-ROM drive kept making noises and the light was blinking like it was trying to read something and the screen was black, like the display was not working. After some troubleshooting, I uninstalled the RAM and reinstalled only 1x2gb in slot 0. the computer started up fine and I went into BIOS and changed it to 128MB. But it wouldnt let me change it. I installed both memory pieces (2x2gb) and the computer is now working fine, except for the fact that the video memory is still 256MB.

I have not had an opportunity to try the laptop on battery, but when I do, I will report the result.

The tech guy where I bought my memory told me Corsair was compatible with Acer because he has an Acer and upgraded with the Corsair. My laptop is still under warranty with Staples Business Depot so I can probably go and argue for a new battery or something.

Will the laptop still be under warranty if I upgraded the memory?

Thanks.