Acer Aspire 5536

[The Natural Philosopher]

My klinux will do it in 12..

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[Dave Plowman (News)]

Think so. To Firefox opening on my home page which is Google.

It comes with McAfee on limited trial. So I've not yet installed AVG free. But have installed Spybot.

[RJH]

I converted to SSD early on - as much for the no-noise as anything. We've recently had SSD PCs at work and the lack of background HD drone is very noticeable to me. And the speed advantages are difficult to ignore by comparison.

Is that past the BIOS? 12s is pretty impressive from power-on.

[Johnny B Good]

As a laptop upgrade, the main charm of an SSD upgrade isn't so much the performance boost so much as the fact that you've replaced the most fragile part of the laptop with the single most robust part, the part that will most likely out survive everything else in a ten foot drop onto a concrete floor. IOW, your first concern after accidentally slamming the lid shut will be the screen rather than the HDD. :-)

I should say so! It takes my recently upgraded desktop PC some 20 odd seconds just to complete the POST sequence before it even starts looking for a boot sector on the nominated boot drive. I think, all in all, it takes about 40 odd seconds from switch on to full readiness on this LM

17.1 KDE 64 desktop machine (quad core AMD with 8GB of ram, a 250GB EVO 850 SSD and a couple of HDDs).

As it happens, I rarely subject this machine to more than one or two cold boots per week so it's not a big deal. It's not that I particularly want to leave it running 24/7 so much as the fact that the TV recording schedule precludes an overnight shutdown.

I was rather hoping to utilise an elderly laptop to handle the DVR duties but this turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. It could do the job ok (using Kaffeine as my PVR) but it involved a rather klunky and onerous file management routine that became old very fast (plus the

32 watts consumption versus the 22 watts under win2k effectively cancelled the power savings gained by shutting the desktop PC down for each 8 hour overnight period - pain with no gain, hence its retirement).

[tony sayer]

Your not still using WIN 2 k nowadays;?....

[Johnny B Good]

Not as a host OS on any "Production" kit. That was a reference to when I was running win2k on the laptop (an Acer Aspire 3660 btw) up until about

4 months ago.

Not one of the several 32 bit lightweight Linux distros I tried on it seemed to understand how to properly shut it down. Since it uses a 1.6GHz Celeron M Processor 420 cpu, I've rather assumed the MoBo is Intel chipset based so I'm rather dismayed at the lack of support demonstrated by the various Linux distros I've tried. It's not as if the kernel devs haven't had some 9 years or so in which to crack the problem. I guess some Acer strangeness must be responsible.

When I bought it, it had been afflicted with winXP MCE (along with a shedload of crippling Acer utility software). I removed the Acer crapware but its performance was still rather lacking so I backed up the disk partitions before wiping it and installing win2ksp4 a week later having made sure I could download win2k drivers from Acer's website beforehand.

The performance improvement was quite impressive to say the least and I never once regretted turfing the winXP MCE install off the laptop, not even for an instant.

I had hoped to be able to repurpose it as an even better PVR using a 32 bit lightweight Linux distro but I've not had any luck. It's a shame since it appears to have outlived its usefulness. Despite spending the past 8 1/2 years or so running 24/7 doing PVR duty under win2k, even the battery still has some 67% of its original capacity left.

TBH, I'm half tempted to revert it back to win2k and accept the relatively limited PVR functionality compared to what's possible using Kaffeine as the recording software under Linux. Almost anything is better than the situation it's now in, perched unused and unloved on top of an office filing cabinet where it's spent the vast majority of its 9 years of faithful service.

[Bill]

In message , Johnny B Good writes

That's interesting, as I had an Acer here with a 1.6GHz Celeron, and I, too, removed XP MCE, but I am fairly sure I replaced it with straight XP Pro. I used that machine for ages developing audio software, and didn't notice any performance problems.

At the time the MCE version was said to be just a version of XP Pro, but whatever the difference was it certainly ruined the audio performance, which was really bizarre on software aimed at media working. The problems of that version became fairly well known at the time.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Got it back from the Ebay repairers today.

They said in their blurb that the price quoted was just to fix the 'solder fault'. If anything else was needed, it would be extra. So was expecting a demand for more, being me. ;-)

But no, they've fixed it for the agreed price of 40 quid. Pretty good value I'd say. Assuming it is a proper re-flow of the solder and not some bodge I don't know about.

There are a few screws missing, but I can live with that or sort it myself.

[John Rumm]

If it was a proper reball, then it should be a good repair - especially if they have shimmed the heatsink to prevent the problem returning.

(If it was a straight reflow, then I predict few months life)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The blurb says they remove the chip, clean off all the old solder and re-solder using leaded. And add a shim.

[John Rumm]

That ought to last then with a bit of luck.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Fingers crossed.

If they have done all that, 40 quid is a steal. Wonder what they pay their technicians?

[dennis]

If its the Nvidia graphics chip problem that was about a few years ago you can't fix it. The problem was in the thermal management inside the package so at best you migt get a year or two from it unless you replace the chip but I don't think they ever did a chip that didn't have the problem.

[John Rumm]

There was a BIOS patch for some of those, that basically throttled the chips performance a little bit to reduce heat dissipation. Might be worth checking if there is one available on the Acer web site for that model.