Aspire 5315 Problems

I received this Acer 5315-2153 for Christmas this year. My parents purchased it at the Walmart secret sale for $348. Since the moment I turned it on, it has been nothing but junk. First, after about thirty minutes of use, I was surprised that the computer simply shut down. No warning, anything. I thought nothing of it, and wondered if maybe my battery died, so I plugged the computer in, and tried again. I was once again, surprised that after about thirty or forty minutes, it shut down again. I immediately guessed overheating, and downloaded a temperature monitor to verify this. Sure enough, within twenty minutes of use, the temperature was up to 90 celsius. At 100, it shuts off, and it reaches this very quickly. Working on a hunch, I removed the battery, and after running for three hours, it was at 46 celsius. I inserted the battery again, and within five minutes the temperature was up to 60 celsius. And within twenty minutes, the temperature had risen back up to 90 celsius. But, that's not the only problems I've had with it. The wifi card has given me trouble since day 1. Most of the time, it simply refuses to connect at all to our WEP-encrypted network, and the rest of the time, it cuts in and out, disconnecting me often. The USB ports are strange sometimes, randomly losing and reacquiring my USB devices. I emailed Acer. Nothing for three weeks. I did it again. Nothing for three more weeks. I tried once more, and guess what. Nothing. So, finally, I sent a almost nasty email those morons, and got a reply "Overheating difficulties with the Acer 5300 series computers are not covered under the Acer 1 year limited warranty. For your other difficulties, we recommend contacting an Acer support retailer near your location" I was astounded to hear this, and this is my first experience with Acer, and I can say it probably will be my last. Their service is horrid, not to mention their quality is only marginally better. It was nice for the first few days I owned it. Now it's a very nice, heavy, expensive wheel chock.

 

take the BIG cover off the bottom

tale the 3 screws holding the FAN out

CLEAN ALL THE DUST/DIRT off the fins in front of the FAN


this link has a PIC of the inside bottom of the unit

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=251130

click the thumbnail at the bottom of first post



upgrade the CPU to get rid of a lot of heat... that link has a lot of different links with info

you may also want to update your BIOS

see that link on the same page

i'll buy that laptop if you wanna sell it at a small loss since it is 8 months used and almost out of warranty

 

after you have done the above,,

you can downgrade to XP and have a computer that can run more than just the factory installed bloated OS and bloatware the manufacturer adds as well

instructions are in the link in the first post under DOWNGRADING TO XP

be sure to burn your recovery disks using the eRecovery app in the green bar


have fun or sell it to me,, i need another one
bigO

 

I did downgrade to XP, and ran it for a few months, but strangely, the overheating problems got WORSE not better. I have tried cleaning the fan out as well, I do it every 60 days on all my laptops. I've never really had a problem with any of them until this one. When it works, it's not bad at all, but it seldom works. I think I'm skilled enough to do a CPU upgrade, I'll have to check that out.

 

did you have a utility running to keep the fan active when you downgraded to XP... because before BIOS VER 1.34 the fan would not restart after the PC went into sleep mode....

just a thought

i used I8KFANGUI or something like that

later,
bigO

 

I used the Acer ePower Management from their website when I used XP

 

not good enough.... doesn't bring fan back to life after sleep/suspend

gotta use I8Kfan

search at google...........

 

From your first post I believe its not the CPU that overheats, its the ACPI. Maybe it's a defective battery. Remember the Sony's batteries? Overheat and boom

 

It's funny you should say that, atthegates, I came here to post that I believe my battery is the culprit. I can't check the temperature of the battery, but I can tell you that for whatever reason, my battery is only showing 50% capacity, and I can only get 1 hour of batt life, so that sounds about right. Also, the battery is only putting out 9.8 volts. It's rated for 12, I believe, but I know for a fact that it should be higher than 9.8 The voltage output is also all over the place, from 8 to 10. And, without the battery in the computer, it doesn't appear to overheat. Should I contact Acer about this, or would I even get anywhere. I've contacted them several times, and so far, their support is lousy.

 

Yeah it's the battery alright. I'd contact Acer. But If I were you, I'll tell them that the battery never charges more than 50% and you have lousy battery life without mention voltages or heat whatsoever. You just want to use your warranty. They can't say no to that.

 

That's a good idea, I would have never thought to say that, hopefully I get somewhere, I haven't in the past.

 

Good luck man let us know what happened.

 

congrats on figuring out the problem,,,

but i must admit i was ready to buy that thing off you... wish i had 10 more of these at that $348 price

 

Well, contacted Acer, told me that batteries are not covered under warranty, and told me that I can buy a new one for $149

That ain't happening.

 

wanna sell it cheap... ???

 

http://search.ebay.com.au/search/se...action=compare&copagenum=1&coentrypage=search

 

Dude that's really bad sorry..

 

Shutdown problem is solved with Bios version 1.34. Install it from acer.com

 

good to hear AKOS,,,,

do you have a problem w/ the first startup of the day???


bigO

 

Hi, my name is Paul and I live near London. UK.

I also have experienced problems with overheating and sudden shut-off.

I had already cleaned out the little cooling fan for a starters...

no change.

To cut a long story short think the best solution is to upgrade the Bios - this is not as scary as I thought it would be.

There are quite a few versions of the Bios on Acers suppor website, the very latest one being 1.43

I urge anyone who is suffering with this problem of overheating and shutdown to go to acer support> drivers> - ignore drivers and scan down to BIOS FOR WINDOWS VISTA! Select the highest version of the bios which is right at the bottom of the list, 1.43

Oh, also select your region too by the way....

When you select the Bios you want it will automatically download in the form of a zip file - easy to unzip and run the Flashfile - its all automatic after that and your laptop will restart itself - On startup press F2 to check that it has installed ok.......

Right now im waiting to see how things panout......!!

Paul

 

Ok, I beat it, I solved my cutout/overheating problem.... It was simple.. It was just clogged with DUST You couldn't see it very well just looking at it but spinning the fan I could see quite a lot of stuff in there after taking the bottom plate off second time and in natural light- I simply hoovered it out with the flexible pipe on my upright and it cooled down straight away - has NOT cut out at all last few days and you can actually touch the keyboard without burning yr fingers - core temp went down from 90c! to 45..

There you go...

No problem at all now SO TRY IT!!

PAUL

 

why don,nt just send it get fix if that new shound be warrenty they appently issues with it so get them fix it:>

 

I had the same problem. It is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to remove the dust from time to time from the inside. You can easily monitor your temperature with Coretemp (it takes almost no resources) and this way you can tell when is time to clean the heat sink.

73 °C (163.4 F) idle / 93 °C (199.4 F) full load before cleaning (fan permanent on)
37 °C (98.6 F) idle / 48 °C (118.4 F) full load after cleaning (almost no fan activity)

 

Hi there, I posted on here about a month ago with help for CPU upgrades. All went well, and was able to max out my 5315 with 3GBs of DDR2 ram, and a basic Intel C2D cpu.

I've now encountered a dire error.

While I had my iPhone, external hard drive and a few programs running, the laptop randomly shut down. No warning, just shut down. I felt the bottom of the laptop and thought that it had overheated and fried the motherboard. Took the back cover off, and nothing seemed out of place.
The laptop now doesn't turn on, and the charger light doesn't work either.

Any suggestions?

 

Did you ever figure out what the problems were? I ask because my laptop will charge at times then all of a sudden it stops charging. I let it shutdown and then wait about one hour and it when I plug it in it starts charging again. Then after about 20 minutes the computer will stop charging and I have to unplug it. Then once again wait another hour and plug it back in and it will start charging once more. Its very annoying and I was wondering if anyone else has the same problem and if they do or did how can I fix it?

 

I used to have a 5315, and after a while(1hour after buying it lol) i installed XP, so i didnt really use it with vista... and started from this day(to me it seemed more like it was like that...) i could tell that to avoid overheating, i had to lift up a lil bit the back of the laptop, then got almost -15°C right away, BUT, this didnt solve any "shutting down" problem, that used to occured occasionnally, but it seemed really like the culprit with the overheating...
then i gave this laptop to my sister, and since the probleme was still running, i finally decided to "fix" it, like i was more lazy when it was for me...
I'll explain exactly how the shutdown occured.... maybe it'll help people...
It was more like, after changing the "mode" unplugged/plugged, if you dont totally shut it down, it will shut down FOR SURE, so anytime i unplugged it, or plugged it i had to shut it down and it wouldnt shut down randomly after this... so i started thinking, this may not be some BIG problem in the end since i could almost determinate "where" was the problem...
so i just looked down, and saw that sticker that seemed useless to me cause i never used VISTA before that... and i saw E-Empowering something blablabla... well the same day i installed Seven... and since i know that Seven has a "good"... powersaving setting etc etc, i thought it would help... so i tried a loooot of setting and was going to my sister's every time she said, IT DID AGAIN, to change the setting till it would work... it wouldnt... so once again i decided to ACTUALLY use that software E-Empowering----------- and , IT HASNT SHUT DOWN FOR 2 MONTHS NOW! so YES the software seems useless cause it hasnt much of settings, but i guess its actually link to the REAL battery/powersaving or whatever but it has a direct link, in my opinion...

Hope it'll help people still having problems for 3 years now lol ^^

 

The software is useless :|

Acer Aspire had a problem fixed by the software above. To shortly describe it => IF you put your laptop in sleep (stand by) mode and than wake it up and you don't have that software installed then the cooling fan will not start at any given temperature.

Imagine that Windows is NOT the only operating system. Many of us use something else. So... the problem above should have never existed on a computer released for public and the software above is just a workaround for a small part of the people (the Windows Vista users).

The real fix came later with a BIOS update. The latest BIOS (v1.45) will fix the fan problem. So... go on the official ACER website and download the latest BIOS. Flash your laptop with it...

 

Well, this maybe the real solution lol just to know; waranty is still running after flashing bios ?

 

I think so... yes. They don't know with what version of BIOS the laptop came.

And... if you are careful the flash will always succeed. (run only the flash utility and almost nothing else. for example... don't watch movies and burn a CD while flashing BIOS , etc...)

Note!
After upgrading to BIOS v1.45 my Windows 7 didn't boot any more (my laptop restarted every time with Blue Screen of Death). But... i said this as the WORST case scenario. I had reasons to get that BSOD every time i booted after upgrading to 1.45 (from 1.43):

• the version 1.45 was temporarily placed on the website; after a week, maybe too it was removed and version 1.43 was, again, the latest for a long time. Maybe that BIOS i downloaded was buggy and changed something is should not have changed
• I had an UN-OFFICIAL version of windows 7 back then (because i was curious ) so it wasn't completely stable

BUT the laptop was perfectly functional. I could reinstall my windows and i could use what ever Operating System i wanted. So... now i have THAT 1.45 version and everything is fine.

My advice... download the BIOS, version 1.45, and without restraints flash it (You must go to this page -> http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/downloads_gd.html <- and start from here in order to find the latest bios)

P.S.
Please tell me how you managed

 

OK i will try this today, btw, i dont know if i can say the name of the app on this forum, but for acer laptop, Winfla*h is enough to flash the bios?

thanks again, i wanted to flash the bios ages ago, but i didnt want to fack it up since its a laptop(dont know how to bsod on a laptop etc...)

EDIT:

Ok, ive flashed the bios to v1,45, it ran OK, it booted OK, just one thing, i reckon the temp is a bit too high for doing nothing... between 44-54°C (up and down randomly)

 

Those temps are normal. I have 46 degrees too right now... just writing this. A year ago the temp was smaller... but i think the thermal paste is slowly degrading. Anyway... 44-54 degrees is not something to worry

 

thanks again
Ok, so i wont worry too much about thoses temps thx ^^
Ive uninstalled Empowering--------------------- and told my sister to tell me if the random shutdowns start again

But i think it got fixed, cuz i put it into sleep mode like 3 times, unplugged/plugged in like 10 times and stayed there for 3 more hours, nothing happened.. (it would definitely shuts down if it was 3 months ago... lol)