Acer Aspire 1710 Review - Page 68

I advice you to replace your heatsinks/coolers with new thermal paste, try to get Artic Silver 5. Also read the cleaning instructions on their site! http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_s...structions.htm
The material where you place your labtop on is also a important for good cooling capacities of your labtop. Mine's standing normally on a oak wooden table, i've noticed that the wood warms up and thus holding the heat from the fans. So the air in also is getting hotter. Imho i think that acer made a design fault by placing the airinlets on the bottom. Why they didn't placed them on the sides, i don't know? Like i've said before, you'll get a huge temperature drop by raising your labtop with 2 cms on the back and 1 cm on the front.

Bazzio I totally agree with you. I also have the lap top on a wooden table and I am sure that there is a recycling of hot air that is happening.

I am not sure if I will find in Cyprus the thermal paste you said, but I will look for it.

Thanks for your advice

My Acer 1714 has had intermittent boot problems for three months now. Most of the time it starts up normally. Once in a while (probably 1 in 10) it will:

1. Start windows xp partially then blue screen and restart, and restart, and restart.

2. Safe mode does the same thing

3. After a fourth or fifth restart, after post it will just state that a system file is missing.

4. Seagate diagnostics won't run on it. Windows XP recovery won't run either.

When this happens I can usually turn it off overnight and it works fine the next day, with no sign there was ever a problem.

When it happened last night it refused to recover. I took the 400 GB hard drive out and am now running a full diagnostic. I suspect hard drive since I put the original 120 back in and it started up fine.

I had something similar happen (blue screen) on boot-ups after tweaking settings I shouldn't have (Partitions C & D were reversed, don't ask me how winblows got so confused).

I re-installed windows on top of itself with a borrowed set of XP Pro install disks since Acer is too damn anal about providing a set and opted out for an easier destroy and restore set, backed up my hard drive to an external hard drive, and then used the restore disks that came with the machine.

You probably have a corrupt file or two that is required for booting, I tried replacing some files and that didn't work either (the partitions were confused). Winblows restore is useless in this situation (at least for me). The destroy & restore method after a restore did work.

I formatted the harddrive and got rid of everything Acer had on the drive and reloaded XP Pro SP2. Still have problems booting. That is all I have is problems with this thing...

1.) Modem won't work any more ... shows in the device manager that everything is OK ... when I try to use it, it tells me "The Port the modem is attached could not be opened." What is that suppose to mean???

2.) I now loose my wireless network and the switch won't work. It won't even switch on. Then after a few more boots and re-install of drivers it works for a while ... then I loose in for no reason.

3.) Once or twice a day the thing just reboots ... for no reason at all while I am working on it.


4.) I also am now loosing my USB device (mouse). It all of a sudden will just loose the USB device driver and completely lock-up. I have to hold the button down until it re-boots just to get it up again ... that is if it comes up normal.

5.) The Temps I have when these strange things start happening is 44°C (79.2°F) for case temps (CPU??) and 51°C (92°F) for Harddrive temps. This is according to the mobilemeter. The ambient temp is 75°F and I have got this thing on 3/4” thick wood blocks for air flow and arcticsilver on the CPU according to their site.

Are these problems Heat Related? How can I fix this thing. I am about ready to mash this thing. It is worthless as a computer.

Any advice would be great.

Alright, I haven't really updated you guys as to after I swapped out my inverter. Can we all say "Join the crowd"? wireless card quit working saying "incompatible driver. application failed to load". After uninstalling/reinstalling hardware and drivers, I just opted to back everything up and go for a fresh reformat. Ha! Still didn't work, same error. So it looks like it might be hardware related. I'm now going through and testing things, but computer's randomly freezing and just being a general good sport about things.

AAaaah, so now I'm at the point where I'm putting together an Ultimate Boot Disk 4 Windows. (See here for more info: UBCD4Win Follow all the links to learn more) I want to use my Acer system CD and program disks to get the boot images and drivers to put on this boot disk.

Do you guys use the Acer Boot disks or do you use another version? I mean it sucks that you can't run a repair/restore of Windows off these two disks without erasing all your data. Anybody with any help/tips/hints on the best way to go about this. I want to get the information that I need off the boot disks to make an .iso image to put on another disk. But of course it wants to boot. Well, I'll try some things tonight. Has anybody changed how it partitions your drives?

Thx.

other graphics cards

Ok ,we've established that it's not possible to find another Geforce go card to fit in.

Would it be possible to add a no Go card in. I.e find a small newer grapghics card, perhaps cut the backing plate of and connect it in?

Would it be able to connect? If it's a standard AGP sockect providing we could find the right size could it be done?

Even if you cut out some of the side panel?

I am struggling with Battlefield two on this machine. The weak link in the 1714 msi is obviously the graphics card. I would be willing to pay up to $450 to get this done.

Or is it possibel to buy the del ATI mobile part?

J

I don't think that the graphic card is that bad. Of course all of us would like to see a new
graphic card for our laptops.

Today I installed GTA:San Andreas. I was totally dissapointed with the laptop's performance. It couldn't run good even with 640x480 and everything low.
I had installed the Forceware 76.40 (or 76.10) drivers.
I downloaded and installed the new Forceware 80.40 drivers.

Now it runs perfectly well with 1024x768 and High detail.
But I prefer 800x600 with Very High detail and Antialliasing 1 ! And it runs just perfect!

The point is that the poor performance was because of the drivers and not the graphic card. I haven't played since now a game that this laptop cannot play flawlessly.
And most of us have tried and were completely satisfied with the performance with demanding games as:
Doom 3
Hl2
Chronicles of Riddick

I don't think that the 5700's time has run out.

Jaylist, the short answer to your question is no, Geforce 5700 128 is the best your gonna get, as someone said, the drivers can often be of detriment to system performance

i heared the 5700 can be modified to 256 or 512 ram

I have heared that too, but I am not so sure if this could boost the performance of our cards. Most or all the games need maximum 128MB. The GPU is all that matters most.

256 or more MBs could be used for 3d-animation and similar Video-demanding programs.

Bf2

Doom 3 was Ok . Far cry was good, although I had to turn some of the detail down.

But BF2 looks like , It's rubbish on my aspire 1710. I a using the latest Beta drivers. I either sell the aspire and build myself a HTPC with ninja gpu or just buy a xbox 360 in september for £300 and get it on that.

Well, when you buy a laptop, you have to compromise with the fact that you cannot upgrade them as desktop PCs. The fact that our 1710-14s have removable graphic card gave as hope for the possibility of a new card.
But I am sure that most of us knew that a new graphic card was just a possibility, not a certainty.
If you are a hardcore gamer, then a desktop PC would be the best choice, but again, upgrading every now and then just to play games is a really expensive habit.

True!

I mean it is a great laptop don't get me wrong. And the drivers may improve enough for BF2. I am stuck now between getting a htpc from selling my laptop and desktop, to just getting a Xbox 360 and PS3, cause they'll have loads of media functionality as well.

I have a decent D/Hell laptop (poor build quality) from work with 1 gb of ram etc for my work so no probs there.

I can't decide. But either way, the 1710 is a great laptop. The other interesting thing is the pentium M which could give 1714-like performamce in a normal size laptop. Of course they're megabucks at the moment but their may be a spiritual succesor to the 1714 within a year or so.

I agree. But nomatter how powerful a laptop can be, the limited or no upgradability they have is a serious problem.
If you consider buying a new laptop, I believe the Fujitsu-Siemens M3438G is a perfect choice. And it has Geforce 6800 256MB. It's price is about 1700-1800 Euros. If I had the money, I would certainly buy it.
But after a year or so, you would see again that it could not play very well the next generation games....

As for the game consoles, well they can never be compared with PCs.
I read a lot of reviews of console games and I read again and again the same disturbing things like:
Not very polished graphics, or, polished graphics but serious frame drops, very large loading times etc. Especially for Xbox and PS2, they push the harware to its limits and you can see that to almost every new title.

Purchasing a console has the same problems as the laptop (cannot be upgraded), with very few extra functions (DVD video, mp3, internet) but with bigger life.

Panther5, from where did you download the latest nvidia drivers for our beast, laptopvideo2go+modded inf? Are u using Forceware 80.40 for GTA:SA? How are they performing with the other games? I heard they have too many probls with mobile gpus.

Hello GDion!

Yes, the drivers are from laptopvideo2go
I played GTA:San Andreas with the 80.40 and it plays perfect! I saw a big improvement compared to 71.60 that I had.
Unfortunately with Doom3 I wasn't so lucky. It has serious problems with that game. The screen is like having a refresh rate of 10 or something like that.
So, I would consider these drivers as unstable.
Also, there is some kind of problem with playing avis. I get black screen. If anyone knows something about this, I would appreciate any suggestions.
I unistalled them and tried the 77.76 which are the latest official (with modded inf).
Both GTA and Doom3 play very well ( I also succesfully tried NWN, Nexus and Chronicles of Riddick), but the black screen in avis remains.
I thought that maybe there was some codec error, but unfortunately, when I try the 71.60 the avis play just fine.

If there was some way to solve the black screen in avis, I would certainly go for the 77.76.

Thanks for the infos.

Have you tried enabling VMR? It's more consuming, I don't like it, but maybe will fix it if you have multiple displays.

Also check here for a known fix for video overlay.

Thank you GDion!

With VRM enabled the problem is fixed. But I discovered that there is no need to, because I tried the avis with the Media player classic and they play just fine. Only with Media Player 10 there seems to be the problem. As for codecs, I use FFDSHOW + AC3 filters + XVID filters.
All of the above apply for the 77.76 drivers from laptopvideo2go with modded inf.
They are stable with every game I tried since now.

Have you ever tried C&C: Generals on aspire? Using nvidia 71.89+latest Realtek drivers+latest patch v1.07, the game is stuttering at 1024x768 even in low settings. This is strange cause i used to play it on a p4 2.4 with GForce4 at 1024 high and it was top. Something is bogus here...