Acer Aspire 1710 Review - Page 60

Recovery Cd

requesting the recovery CD~~
I bought a 1710 from ebay but he didn't supply the recovery cd!
could someone kindly make a copy of the cd for me pls?
I will pay you for the cost for sure!! thanks a lot.
my email address is goemon@shaw.ca

mate, instead of asking people here to make you a recovery disk just get one from acer in your country. It'll be much faster and you'll also have the official thing, they sent my ones to me free when i broke them!

Hmmmz, your CPU temperatures are not normal. sounds like your CPU cooler isn't performing 100%. Does your fan makes more noise then normal? Because with this temps. It should go up to "are you crazy" mode, and that is very loud! As told in my earlier posts, i've had simulair problems. CPU went up to 62 °C. Acer replaced the CPU cooler, temps are ok now. Because i wanted the fanspeed 1 step lower, i redone the cooler with Artic Silver 5. Temp. is now around 46°C when browsing. Temp with 100% CPU usage is now max. 51 °C. And i've raised my labtop 2 cm at the back and 1 cm at the front, done that because it stands normaly on a wooden oak table, this also lowered the temp with a few degrees. But main thing call Acer (i asume you still have warrenty) and let it repair.

actually my fan never goes into "are you crazy mode", at least from what I can tell, it's noisy but the level of noise doesn't change from 60C to 90C ... so as you said, the CPU cooler must be somehow broken. I finished backing up all of the stuff I had on my HD that I needed and tomorrow I'm going to the place where they sold it to me. I'll explain the problem and if the guys do it themselves I'll tell them to add Artic Silver if they have it.

Thanks again guys!

I just called Acer. and they said my laptop is out of warranty because i bought it used........ so they won't cover the CDs.... can someone help me with the recovery cds please?....

Burner Question

I was wondering if anyone might know if the Pioneer DVR-K04L is compatible as an upgrade to the Aspire 1710, et seq. I was looking to replace the present cd burner with a dvd burner upgrade




Aspire 1712, P4 3.2 Ghz, 2GB/ 133, WD 180GB,

[quote=crustyone]I was wondering if anyone might know if the Pioneer DVR-K04L is compatible as an upgrade to the Aspire 1710, et seq. I was looking to replace the present cd burner with a dvd burner upgrade

Any slimline optical drive should work just fine in the machine. The tricky part comes with the bezel. If you order a new drive, the bezel will most likely be square and probably won't match the color of the Aspire 1710 series. If this does not bother you, then you should be fine.

Also, if you upgrade to the same series of drive, you can usually swap the bezel to the new drive. For examply, I have the Super Multi Drive from Panasonic. The machine originally had a UJ-820 model. I simply ordered a new UJ-830 model which offered faster burn speeds all around and then swapped my original bezel onto this new drive. You can also order original bezel's from Acer spare parts as well. The DVD-Dual drive bezel should match up with Pioneer drives and the DVD-Super Multi drive bezel will match up with Panasonic drives.

Unfortunately, it sounds worse that what it is. All of this is due to the fact that each manufacturer does not place the light, emergency eject hole, and door open button in the same position. Therefore, unique bezels are needed for each drive manufacturer.

Temps

Relatively Idle (after warming up an hour on A/C mains), sufing the net, e-mail, etc.:

HD: 50-52C
CPU: 45-50C
GPU: 56C


Immediately after pressing Alt-tab while nVidia Temperature consol is up under the game (UT2004 all max graphics settings with minor overclocking 387/633 - 9% frame rate increase, minor artifacting only on rare occasions, temperatures taken when artifacting)

HD: 52-55C
CPU: 68-70C
GPU: 98-100C (drops under 90C in under half a second, under 84C in two seconds, under 75C in ten seconds)


During 100% Hard Drive Load (after 20 minutes): Defrag and/or surface scan, data erasure, or other disk intensive processes:

HD: 58-62C (only above 60C when A/C was out, and ambient room temperature was higher)


During dual 100% CPU load (HT):

CPU: 70-72C

Thanks alot, I will look into ordering the bezel from Acer for the Pioneer Drive, that should work. Will let you know in the future. Also, I plan on ordering the internal Bluetooth card and antenna. Presently I use a Linksys Bluetooth dongle with a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse and the Jabra Bluetooth headset. Use the Jabra for video conferences with my kids in Florida. Tried it for voice recognition but wasn't too good.
In case any one is interested, I use this beast primarly for voice recognition in writing. Use it with a Plantronics USB headset with built in sound card. Gets the best results as the onboard sound card is not good enough for voice recognition. Use it with Dragon Naturally Speaking 8.0 and get over 95% results. I speak relatively fast so the 2GB Ram was pretty much a necessity

Thanks again, this forum has been great in helping me with this monster. I am so sorry that Acer discontinued it. It is a great desktop replacement.

Here is the part number that you would need if interested:

42.A15V7.004 COVER.BEZEL.DVD-DUAL.PIO.

If you actually want the module that already comes with the bracket and bezel with the drive, that information is as follows:

6M.A15V7.002 MODULE.DVD-DUAL.DVR-K12RA
6M.A15V7.004 MODULE.DVD-DUAL.DVR-K13RA

These are both Pioneer drives with slightly different burn speeds essentially(K12RA - 2x, K13RA - 4x).

I also have part information for the Panasonic Super Multi Recorder drive line if anyone reads this in the future and is interested.

The Distribution Disks & How to do a better Recovery

On the Disks it prohibits reproduction, however their contents should already be on your hard drive and they are useless for a repair type recovery except for a complete destruction of your data files (see below) and you will have to start over completely from scratch.

Part Numbers for the 1712 SMi, English Language XP-Pro versions are as follows which you should be able to order through Acer:

Disk 1: SD.A1505.002
Disk 2-1 & 2-2: RD.A1506.020 (English XP Pro version)

Disk 1 will boot you up in autoexec command prompt type version of Windows 98 recovery disk (It even says Windows 98 when booting from CD). It also has the drivers that can be found on the website for download. What cannot be found on the website can be found on the 3rd 8MB partition (standard FAT) that is hidden except in fdisk.exe.

Disk 2-1(&2) has two recovery image files only on it and DOS based recovery tools also found on disk 1, the same ones found on D:\IMAGES (a hidden folder on the 2nd Partition - FAT32). These image files will destroy the entire current contents of your NTFS partition. Follow the instructions below to recover your machine with your data (the stuff that hasn't been backed up since your last backup) and current drivers intact. These two disks have some basic MS-DOS recovery files that are also found on the 3rd 8MB partition and remain common to all three disks in the \TOOLS\ folder/directory.

If Winblows crashes (which it just did on me on Friday) as it produced the following error on me in an endless loop while restarting during a windows-F search that became unresponsive:

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart

I used the following steps to make windows work again and recover my data:

Enter your BIOS on the next boot (F2) and change the order of your boot to make your CD boot first. Boot from Disk 1 and press Ctrl-C when the machine asks to you continue and confirm that you do want to interrupt the batch file. Or boot from a CD that has been formatted exactly as a Windows 98 recovery floppy disk. Unless you have a built-in floppy (1710/1711) you will have to use a CD.

Also make sure you copy the \WINDOWS\I386 folder to your D: (ACERDATA) partition if you haven't already done so (I copied another machine's XP Home version on this one after-the-fact and it worked to recover XP Pro) to the Win32 (factory default D: ) partition otherwise and use the recovery procedure after running WINNT.EXE from the I386 folder, let it install windows on the D: drive (the FAT32 partition that is visible from the Boot Disk, it is now your C: drive since the NTFS partition isn't recognized). Ignore/Skip any errors that you receive, let the machine reboot and choose the recover/restore/repair selection when it offers it to you. This will procedure will also create and populate two new folders/directories that look similar to $WIN_NT$.~LS and $WIN_NT$.~BT on this partition's root.

It will then scan your machine (it took 9 minutes on the 120 gig HD) to find the previous version of windows that it will label as [1]F:\WINDOWS. Select it, it will ask you for your Administrator password, enter it.

You will now be in a very restricted UNIXish style consol in F:\Windows which normally would be C:\Windows if your system was operating normally. Type the following command: BOOTCFG /? (I forgot the exact switch as it is different when running in normal mode and select the switch on the command that will scan and set your boot to F:\WINDOWS, run the BOOTCFG command with the correct switch, this will also take 7 - 9 minutes as it will scan all partitions).

You may want to check your folder/directory entries in Windows (DIR), if it looks amiss, you may also want to type CHKDSK /P to correct it, this may take up to an hour to complete as it also may seem to hang along the way, as long as your HD light is lit, you should be okay. You can also change drives and see other commands using basic MS-DOS commands that will give you UNIX style output. You will be very restricted at which directories/folders you can view and manipulate. To see the commands you can use type HELP add a /? after a command to see the usage for a specific command. Note: If you are unfamiliar with MS-DOS/UNIX command lines this will be very difficult for you, find someone who is comfortable using them and other cryptic features of the OS.

Eject your CD, and then type EXIT to reboot your machine. You will get a blue screen similar as before, let it cycle through the 5 seconds and you should be booting up normally after that. In order to avoid the blue screen you will have to modify your boot.ini file after changing the file attributes on the file. There are plenty of tutorials on the net on how to do this.

Once you have verified everything is working satisfactorily and run your disk unitilies, you can then delete the two directories/folders that are similar to $WIN_NT$.~LS and $WIN_NT$.~BT on partition D: (ACERDATA). Also don't forget to change your BIOS settings back to way you want them for booting order.

Note: Now I know why Acer created these additional partitions, even though it wastes' 10 gig's, it came in very helpful. 5 gig's is all what they really need for these extra partitions as I already had 5 gig's of mirrored data on the D: drive. However, technical support only dealt with hardware issues and made no mention of using or setting up the ACERDATA partition for use in recovery. When it comes to software issues the Acer technical support is as useless as a snowblower in the tropics.

Warning: If your system is operating (even poorly) and you don't know how to use the programs listed in this post, do not use them as they can muck up your system really quickly. This is only intended to give you a last resort instruction on how to recover your system when all else fails and your machine appears to be completely dead.

I am also writing this from memory, so there may be a minor step or two missing, but there should be enough information here to get you up and running again in case of a major malfunction in the OS.

Thanks again.
I checked with Acer Spare Parts for the bezel and ordered it. However, when deciding to use the Pioneer or the Panasonic, I orginally decided on the Panasonic so gave them the part number from earlier posts. They said that it was not a valid part number. Ordered the Pioneer instead. Also ordered the Bluetooth parts.

Will post my relative sucess in this matter.

It is a valid part number. However, Acer Spare Parts is not always the best place to order from. I order most parts from ERS Limited, based in the UK (they do ship to USA) and they stock almost every spare part you could ask for. Their web site is www.ers-limited.co.uk.

I even ordered a spare Super Multi Recorder bezel from them that is brand new. If you end up needing it, let me know and I can sell it to you for the price I paid for it.

Received bezel and the Bluetooth assembly from Acer today, other than the posts on this thread any words of wisdom before I attempt the installation. It seems to be straight forward.

Thanks again to all, especially DW Strickland

Installed the Bluetooth Module, as per the post. All went smoothly, except a little nervous in running the antenna. I guess it has to go underneath the board and then towards the sub-woofer. Software is on the Acer CD #1 and ran it from there. Installs the WIDCOM Drivers. The only real problem is with XP which defaults to the Microsoft Bluetooth drivers. Had to force the use of WIDCOM through update driver wizard and chose the WIDCOM drivers listed under the CSR USB Bluetooth Device. Otherwise would not work with my JABRA headset. Microsoft doesn't seem to offer these services in bluetooth. Hope this experience may help someone in the future.

Yes, since the Aspire 1710 is so nice in the entire removable bottom base cover, it allows you to easily run the antenna. You were correct about the drivers and software being on CD #1. Also, since I installed the bluetooth before Service Pack 2 was released, when SP2 was installed, it did not divert to the Microsoft Bluetooth driver set.

However, for anyone who does install the bluetooth/modem combo daughtercard, you just have to do like crustyone stated: install the software, change the driver to the CSR Bluetooth device by using device manager and update driver wizard if it is showing Microsoft as the provider of the driver. It seems that the Microsoft bluetooth driver does not support as many features and devices as the original WIDCOMM bluetooth driver set.

In fact, this exact procedure is recommended by WIDCOMM in order to use their Bluetooth driver/software on XP SP2 installations (if bluetooth is installed after SP2 is installed).

Simple question, I hope, but why would I want to install a newer version of my BIOS if my computer is working fine? Fine, except that the fan is more like a jet engine?

Thanks all.

Hahaha, you're right. If your labtop is working fine don't do a BIOS update, there's always a (small) risk that something goes wrong. But normaly a Bios update comes out to fix known bugs. 3A20 has a fix for the >512 mb mem. bug. 3A25 still don't know what the fixes are. About the fan speeds, still don't know for sure if raising the fan speed was a update .

Heh

You meant 3A25 fix that 512 MB bug on 3A20

Whatever