Acer Aspire 5536

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Right. I've obviously bought something from them - but not a laptop. Must have been a trouble free purchase or I'd have remembered. But thanks for that.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Right - it's a brand I hadn't really heard of. But I'm not enthusiastic about such things. Just want one I like and lasts.

(It's a function of still using an Acorn for the things it still does well. I have two of them both some 20 years old which have only ever needed HDs replaced.)

I'd be happy with another machine of about the same spec or better than the Acer. Really don't need the latest whizz bang machine. And am happy with Win7 although may upgrade to Win 10 when it is sorted. But really don't want Win 8.

I'd rather buy new, and could afford about 500 quid. So a 'run-out' model may be the way to go. But which make?

Argos appear to have a vast selection.

If it helps, the Acer spec is:-

15.6" widescreen. Don't want a 4:3 of any size. 4G RAM 2.1G processor. HDMI connector. About 500 Mb HD. Not willing to pay silly prices for a SSD.

A decent quality sound card - in and out - would be the icing on the cake. As would a proper serial port - but I'll be lucky with that one.

[John Rumm]

+1000

Had a couple of dealings with them - once in the Laptops Direct Guise, and another as Aircon Direct. I now keep a very wide distance! Never again.

[John Rumm]

Real serial ports are almost non existent these days, although you can get USB to serial adaptors which work with varying degrees of success.

I have been buying lots of HP 350 G2 Laptops recently. They come with

15.6", i5-5200U, 4GB, 500GB, Btooth, HDMI, Win7 Pro preloaded, and / W8 Pro on DVD. I do them at £389 inc VAT. If you clone the disk onto a 240GB SSD from new, then they really fly.

(A kingston HyperX 240GB Savage SSD Drive would add £83 to the price of the above, and it comes with a license for Acronis True Image 2014, which makes cloning the existing drive easy).

[Clive George]

All easy

Most will come with mic and headphone sockets, but they probably wouldn't count as "decent quality". Can one get USB devices that fit that bill?

You'll not get a serial port.

If you want sturdy, get a business rather than consumer machine. More money though.

[Bill]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

The Lenovo Thinkpads usually have firewire, which I use a lot for audio devices.

Older Thinkpads had Analog Devices soundcards, which I have always liked. Later ones have Connexant, and I'm not sure about what audio ports are provided. Older machines did have line in, sometimes via a docking station, I don't think these newer ones do.

Keyboards are the other thing. Lenovo Thinkpads have superb ones, but the ones I have don't have the separate numeric block. A lot of people find the key layout a bit quirky, too, although I like it and the Trackpoint (as well as touchpad). Many models , like a lot of business machines, have cd readers and writers, but only read dvd's

I just looked on ebay and T510's and T520's seem to be from about £100 to £350. Morgan Computers, amongst many others, seem to sell them.

[Bod]

Acer Aspire E5-571 15.6" 4GB 500GB Core i7 Laptop

Ok it's another Acer, but I've used this shop for years. Very good service and very good after sales service.

[Bod]

Added to that, they claim a 10 hour battery life for this model.

[Bod]

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Neither of which are likely to be much good on a five year old machine.

I checked with Acer to see if they could supply a new motherboard. They could at one time - but not now.

I can quite understand things wearing out. But a motherboard failing on a little used - and carefully handled machine - doesn't give me confidence in a maker.

The other thing design wise was leaving the battery in the machine and the power supply plugged in, but the machine switched off locally resulted in a fried battery just out of warranty. Again, just poor design.

So although they appear good value for money, I've been rather put off the maker.

[Bod]

I have an Acer Aspire 6935G laptop, I've had it 6 years and hammered it, it's still working great. I feel that you've been unlucky. My only gripe is the difficulty in renewing the Bios battery.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Well, since all the used 5536 motherboards for sale on Ebay are faulty, you can be fairly sure it a common problem with the 5536. Perhaps they've sorted it on other models. The cooked battery was also common - and not cheap to sort.

And I've just looked on Ebay at the 6935G. There are some working motherboards on offer (at a high price for a used item) - but also lots of faulty ones. Look for yourself.

As regards the BIOS battery, mine was showing 3.2v. And original.

[John Rumm]

The graphics chip problem was not limited to acer at around that time frame though - it bit quite a few makers using a similar architecture and thermal platform. (Not helped by ATI having a batch of slightly suspect GPUs as well a few years back).

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Can you recommend a repairer, John? It would seem a shame to just junk an otherwise mint laptop. Even although I'm going to buy a new one from an impeccable source. ;-)

I did ask the one who advertises on Ebay about whether they'd fix it if sent with no HD. But haven't had a reply.

[John Rumm]

If you are just going for a reflow, then I would be inclined to give it a go yourself. If you have a hot air paint stripper then you can use the technique I posted earlier. You have not got much to lose, since it does not work now, the worst that can happen is it stays that way.

I have not paid to have a commercial reball, so can't really recommend one personally.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I do even have a hot air re-work station. But avoid small stuff like the plague. ;-)

The Ebay place

seem to to the job properly. Remove the chip, clean and re-solder. Considering they also strip the machine down, sounds too good to be true.

[John Rumm]

Well they certainly make all the right noises regarding their process... so might be worth a go.

I would guess on some laptops they could do the whole job in 20 to 30 mins, and so could turnover several per hour perhaps. Having said that, there are others[1] which are a right PITA to work on!

[1] e.g. Dell are often ok to work on, but the other day I had an inspiron to fix that had suffered a fairly serious hard drive problem. It was the most complicated hard drive removal I think I have ever done. On some machines, you undo one screw, pop a cover off and there is the HDD. On this you one take all the screws out of the bottom (remembering those hidden under rubber feet). Then take the keyboard off, take all the screws out from under that. The undo all the flexi connectors that encircle the KB tray. Now you can remove the base plastic and see the motherboard. Then take the display connector off, and unscrew the screen and remove that, then unscrew the motherboard, disconnect it from its daughter boards and another bunch of flexi connectors, and finally, screwed to the underside of the board was the HDD!

[Bill]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

His feedback is interesting if you just count the positive and negatives relating to that type of job.

I can't remember which machine it was, probably an old IBM, but I decided that a certain voltage regulator chip was the problem. I purchased a couple of spare chips and decided it needed more skill than I had. We have a local place that did that sort of repair on mobile phones, so I paid them a visit, watched and was impressed by what they did. I showed them the laptop and the chip, but they talked me out of letting them do the job. I think their main argument was the chance of damage to other components and connections as the board was multi-layer and more delicate, they said, than the phone internals of the day.

It may, of course, have just been that they didn't want any hassle.

I'd be very interested in results if you did go ahead, but personally, I'd still go for a new or good used business machine.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

And just a further thanks for supplying one, John.

You are absolutely right about the performance with the SSD.

From switch on to browsing with Firefox, exactly 32 seconds. ;-)

[John Rumm]

;-) Indeed - it feels like a real chore to go back to a machine with a spinning drive these days.

With virus scanner installed?