My dear 5920G laptop died - Bought a 6930G now

Yes, my 2-year old laptop died three days ago, I tried to do everything to resurrect it but it was all in vain. I thought it was the bios or the CMOS battery but in the end I gave it to a IT technician to see what's the problem. Yesterday, he told me with a cold voice that something is wrong with the motherboard, everything else is fine. I was feeling like the whole world was spinning around. A bit melodramatic, yes, but honestly I thought I had one of the best laptops (like most of us) and it's gonna last forever. The options were to repair or replace the motherboard. Repairing the motherboard (£130) will give me the feeling that after a couple of months something else will come up again and buying a new one, the cost is substantial (£300). So I decided to buy a cheap 6930G (£450) and transfer my old components to the new one (T9300 and 8600M GT and maybe try to find a way to add the old drive to the second HDD bay). Then I will sell in ebay everything that is left and try to cover the cost since my pocket money are running a bit low.
So the new Acer I bought has the following specs
LX.AUU0X.151
Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 / 2 GHz
3 GB RAM (DDR 2 or DDR3, I am not quite sure but I think it's DDR3)
250GB HDD 5400 rpm
256MB DDR2 9300M GS (I read in the forums that it's a MXM type II)
16' TFT 1366 x 768 ( WXGA )
3.6 Kg (that's a lot)
and of course Windows 7 free upgrade (so that's £50 off since I was planning to upgrade in the next days)
To be honest with you I don't like the 6930G, I prefer the looks of my old lappy (dead lappy ). Especially the new keyboard. Having in mind that I thought the 5920G had the best laptop keyboard ever, the 6930G is quite disappointing . My friend has one, and when you press the keys the whole keyboard is wobbling, feels like it doesn't belong there and it's a bit longer than it should. Anyway I don't want to offend any 6930G owners, after all, I am gonna be another one from tomorrow. At least I can upgrade the GPU with more confidence, have two HDD bays, larger screen and better I heard, hopefully without CPU throttle problems and of course the illuminated Acer logo on the back .

1 P.S. Has any 6930G owner updated to the new bios 3236?
Your opinios are welcome.
2 P.S. I will try and prepare photos of the upgrades I am gonna do this time and keep you posted.

 

My guess was your old laptop had 8600GT and died
You should have tried solder reflow before giving up since it is already dead not really sure but I thought I heard 8600GT died because of solder fracture.
Anyone know the actual cause?

 

My thought exactly! You shoudn't gave up your 5920G so easily, it's great piece of machinery and has pretty nice design. Please try with changing the GPUs from one laptop to another, I'm sure that this is your problem. I love my 5920G and I'm not going to sell it no matter what

 

I haven't thought of that. But the IT technician told me that the GPU was ok and the problem was specifically on the motherboard. That's why I bought a new laptop.
If it is the GPU though, I am gonna be very angry (HULK-like) . Believe me I didn't want to buy a new laptop, I just trusted that IT guy.
Either way, as I said I am planning to transfer the 8600M GT to the 6930G and see if it is working there.
Tomorrow we shall know.

 

Try it mate, swap them both - 8600M in 6930G and 9300M in 5920G, this is your last shot. I really hope that your 5920G would run flawlessly and I would REALLY hate nVIDIA if it does. Almost scraped 5920G because of faulty nVIDIA

 

New Acer 6930G arrived today early this morning. I was quite anxious to test the old GPU to see if that was the reason my dear 5920G died. So I managed to swap the GPUs and the 8600M GT is now working in the new 6930G. The 5920G with the 9300M didn't wake up though .
I managed also to put the T9300 in the new lappy (it took me a while) and the 2GB RAM stick I had in 5920G.
I have attached a photo from the WEI.
The score in WEI is with overclocked 8600M GT (610/450/1300). I haven't managed to do a lot with the new laptop. I have to admit though that Acer has installed so much crap software in this laptop. What is it with the Acer Game Zone ? They have installed 20-40 DEMO games there and you have like 60 min play time. I have spent almost all day uninstalling all the crapware and installing something useful like firefox, ccleaner, drivers, updates (it came with Vista SP1 and not SP2). I haven't removed everything yet but so far the running services from 90 dropped to 56 . It is still far away from the 42-43 services I had in my 5920G.

EDIT: I would like to point out as well that the 8600M GT will work on the 6930G only with the 3121 BIOS and will not work with the new 3236 BIOS (I tried it and it just kept rebooting or didn't even turned on sometimes).

 

My condolences for your 5920G than I guess this is the very first time when a faulty nVIDIA GPU lives more than the lappy in which it was installed Glad that you have transfered quite a lot of your parts to the new lappy and everything is running fine

 

I'll make a note of the 5920G/9300M GS as a failure in the MXM thread. Glad to hear the 6930G is doing well!

 

It is strange that your laptop died before the faulty 8600M GT; I'm waiting for the 8600M GS in my 5920G to die and then look how can I replace it.

 

Actually his motherboard is dead, so any GPU would fail

Go for HD4650

 

BTW, give this technician a beer from me, he deserve it When I read your post I almost instantly thought - faulty GPU, but as I see, it wasn't the case. What happened, how it passed away?

 

Duly noted and corrected.

 

But still you got a more powerful graphic card equiped 6930G so your transferring efforts are not in vain.
How about baking the mainboard of the 5920G? Just Joking

 

I have no idea mate. One morning when I pushed the power button to turn on the laptop, the lights came on and I heard two short beeps. I looked around for possible meaning of these two beeps and I found that it could be either RAM or CMOS battery problem. Another guy reported here in our forums with a 7720G that he had a very similar problem but his thread didn't come up with any reason or solution. I also found a very good guide to flash your bios from a usb if the screen is off or your laptop doesn't log in into windows. Then I removed the CMOS battery and for a moment I thought the laptop was working since it looked like it was logging into Windows but I had no screen. I thought the screen was the problem or the GPU. I played around but in the end whenever I turned on the laptop, the lights will come on, the hard drive will be read three times and then it will stop there, with the lights still on. If I'd pressed the power button again, it switched off immediately. And that was the point when I said that's enough and I gave it to the technician (£35). He checked everything (as a matter of fact he gave the idea that a software did the hard job running overnight tests) and he said that the problem was located in the motherboard. It could have been a minor problem but it could have been a major one as well. That's the end of my 5920G.

 

Reseat RAM?
Swap RAM?

 

Yeap, I tried both of them as well. The only thing that comes to my mind and I didn't try was to use a new CMOS battery but I can't see how that could have helped since in desktops BIOS should work even without CMOS battery (it just loads BIOS default setiings).

 

Have you tried to remove the hard drive and boot from live CD? I'm just guessing there, but I really want this 5920G alive.

 

Thanks for your interest triturbo. No, I didn't try that one, good thought by the way. Although, I tried to flash the BIOS through a USB stick and removing the HDD beforehand but it failed. Just to remind you that my screen was blank and I cannot see the Acer BIOS access menu at all (you know where you press the F2 to enter the BIOS menu). So I don't know if it will be successful to boot from Live CD. That's why I was thinking it might be bios related or dead motherboard as I was told afterwards.

 

Well, that might've done it. Bad BIOS flash tends to result in a notebook-turned-doorstop.
My question is whether the 6930G can handle DDR2-800 since the chipset should be able to support it.

 

I meant the laptop.

I'm seriously fed-up with this 5920G. I have lots of problems. I've cleaned the laptop many times recently and it still overheats, I have done a factory restore and defrag and clean the laptop every day and it's terribly slow, two arrow keys, the spacebar and control have popped off (all of them vital for gaming) and the headphone/speaker jack NEVER stays in place, so it's nearly impossible to use them.

 

I don't undestand your question TehSuigi.

 

I understand your furstation McMaster but my laptop was absolutely fine until the mbr died. I never had any problem, what so ever. I don't know if your laptop is still under warranty so you can send it to Acer but don't wait for the GPU to fail.

 

I think the warranty has expired... I don't remember when I bought it, but I think it's over a year.

I have adapter problems too... I have opened it numerous times to fix it, and it needs fixing once every month.

I'd better start having backups before my laptop suddenly dies.

 

I meant it too. Don't you know, that 5920G can run HD4650? Here, educate yourself
I feel bad for your 5920G, mine is up and running although it has pretty hard time with me as an owner

 

Since my laptop has so many problems, the HD 4650 would be useless.

And I already knew the HD 4650 could work in the 5920G.

 

Well, the 6930G uses the PM45 chipset, which is capable of DDR2-800 memory. But the specs for the 6930G state only DDR2-667. Strange...

 

It is even more strange the fact that here (UK) some vendors state that they are selling Acer 6930G with DDR3 RAM. I don't quite understand what is going on with this laptop. Crucial website though recommends DDR2 800 or 667.

 

I'll have some 800mhz ram to chuck in it when I get it.

 

The 6935G uses DDR3 - it's possible there was a mix-up.

 

As far as I know, the 6930G uses DDR2 and the 6935G uses DDR3 RAM.