Acer Aspire 5102 stuttering problem

Hi, I got my 5102 last year and I'm very happy with it. Just one thing has been annoying me lately. I'm finding that if I'm watching movies or playing games (even flash one online) for any length of time, the graphics will stutter for about 5s and then run normally for about another minute or two - then this process repeats. Anybody else having this problem, or any ideas as to what the problem might be? I also notice that when I'm using the machine for a while the area above the PCMCIA slot gets very warm. Took the harddrive bay cover off and it was pretty darn hot...Again any ideas? The only thing that ever takes up the PCMCIA slot is my Audigy 2 Notebook soundcard...

Thanks.

 

You said you took off the hard drive bay cover but did you ever take off the big cover under the system as well. That big cover will allow access to the CPU fan this can often in alot of notebooks become clogged with dust and other debris which can lead to overheating and if you check the 5102 thread on this forum you will see that a few 5102 owners solved their video sticking problems by just cleaning out that fan (blades and vent as well), but I don't know if this might work for you.

Now you say you have a Audigy 2 Notebook soundcard in the PCMCIA slot well that is very close to the hard drive, infact in the 5102s design the PCMCIA slot is right above the hard drive and I would imagine that sound card when in action will generate quite some heat, and the hard drive itself generates heat so that might explain why the palm rest and surrounding areas get so hot on your 5102. Is there any special reason you are using an external sound card (professional music editing ? ) or do you just not want to use the one that the notebook comes with ? The realtek HD audio IMO works great as long as you use headphones and not rely on the crappy notebook speakers.

 

Hey, thanks a lot! It seems to have worked very well!! The graphics problem appears to be solved - there was a chunk of fluff in the heatsink assembly - suprising what a difference it made!! I think I'll keep on top of cleaning the fan out in future...

As for the heat of the palm rest, that has gone down considerably also - the reason I'm using the Audigy is because I have 5.1 surround speakers and I'm pretty anal about things sounding good .

Thanks for the suggestions!

 

Don't mention it, glad I could help you . Just remember with most notebooks as soon as you detect the signs of overheating check the fan and its vents for debris.

 

First post here, so I hope this is in the right place.

Since I 'upgraded' my 5102 to Vista a few weeks ago I've had dreadful sound problems. I am hoping to use the machine to evaluate whether there is any hope for being able to use Vista for pro audio. At the moment I can only use the internal Realtek audio, and an Edirol USB 'soundcard'. The other usb and firewire audio devices are still awaiting Vista drivers.

With the internal sound I have clicks on playback. After email to Acer support, I've re-installed Vista about 6 times in various ways with different combinations of drivers, without the e-whatever things etc, all to no avail. If anything it has got worse. The only non-original thing running on the machine is AVG, and I've tried a copy of RealAlternative to give me a second media player.

My test audio is a simple uncompressed wave file of 1kHz tone with a duration of 100 seconds. There are clicks, and now actual gaps in the audio.
When I installed a recording app, the recordings had obvious gaps and the video level meters and waveform display lagged horrendously and then gave up.

Playing the sample audio that comes with Vista doesn't really reveal the problem - tone does.

I've tried to update the video driver to 8.352, but the log files just say fail and the driver stays at 8.31 or whatever it was.

I've asked in a newsgroup about other people's experiences, but all I got was one answer from someone who does audio on Vista on a Dell, who seemed happy with his results. Can anyone here throw any light on what to do next?

Sorry about the length of this post.

PS. Having spent some more time on this, with the internal Realtek audio, it seems to depend on the playback volume. Turning down the volume vastly reduces the gaps/clicks. WTF, as the saying goes.