Acer TravelMate 8100!!! - Page 70

BTW, weird little hiccup just now. Wi-Fi card conked out. No reception. Had to restart to make it work again. Then, my keyboard was disabled! Restart again. Trouble disappeared.

That's what you get for buying a 1.0 beta!

P.P.S. On tuesday, I used the Acer for my first presentation to an audience, without bringing my Sony Z1 as a back-up.

But it worked flawlessly with a Moscone Center projector. It widescreens PowerPoint on the Acer LCD display while displaying 1024x768 nicely on the big screen.

1b) Yeh I run CPU about 800, 80% brightness, WiFi on.

4) I see a white line WHILE I'm changing resolutions, when the screen is black. It appears for many res changes but not all. There is no line there when gaming or normal operation. I'll keep my taskbar on the right for awhile to monitor.

7) Use Mobile Meter and stretch the window in all directions for finer gradations.

About flickering problem:

According to the Acer technician who checked my 8104, it is more serious than a battery problem and has to do with something inside the 8100, although no further details (sorry). So either replacement or refund, don't know yet. I wasn't really convinced by the BIOS story, because my battery didn't charge at all, not even when 8104 was turned off. Although the BIOS story made some sense and it really looked like he knew what he was talking about.

OMG! I just realized why the Wi-FI conked out last night: it's so easy to actually press that lighted wireless network button accidentally, which turns it off! Bad design, clearly. Should be much harder to toggle, so this doesn't happen.

Also, I do notice the light will go off entirely as someone remarked earlier, while Wi-Fi reception remains fine. Go figure.

I've have the flicker problem too. The first time, I forgot to plug in the system when I got to work. The "you are on battery now" balloon pops up, the system behaves as if the power adapter were unplugged (thus the flash as the monitor goes to low power mode).

The thing I noticed was the power adapter got VERY warm (ok, hot) when it was in this mode. The system seemed to be unable to charge the battery and run the system. I shut the system down and left it plugged in for a couple of hours, the charge came back and everything was fine again....until last night, when I forgot to take the power adapter home and I ran down the battery at home. This morning, it was back in the flicker mode, seemingly stuck at 7% battery.

The theory of the guy I work with (who has a EE background) is that the adapter doesn't have enough amps...

So, I shut my system down and was waiting for the battery to charge when the DHL guy arrived with my new EZ Dock!!! Cool!.

Guess what? The dock comes with a bigger adapter. It comes with a Liteon 7.1 amp adapter, and the default adapter is a 3.42 Amp Delta.

So... I plugged in the dock, powered everything on, booted the system. It's been running for 15 minutes now with no flicker. and the battery is at 14% now.

The plug on the Liteon looks similar to the Delta, but is a little shorter. I wouldn't plug it into the laptop directly without calling Acer first.

so, my experience at least would tend to indicate an underpowered default power adapater.

Please let us all know more about the EZDock. There is so little information online about it, it would be really nice to get a little mini-review.
Thanks.

What else does the ezdock have and do you find it valuable?

http://us.acer.com/acerpanam/wr-reso...ta%20sheet.pdf

This is my 3rd notebook with a dock. (Sony and IBM R32 prior). It's by far the biggest (it's literally about the size of a brick) but it has a lot more port than either of the prior docks too. I have an LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse and power plugged in, so when I get to work I just snap it in. I run dual screen (notebook and LCD). with the IBM, I did side by side, but right now I have the Acer below and in front of the LCD.

Underneath is a little square with 2 screws, big enough for something interesting...but I haven't looked in yet.

Back to the flicker issue: I called Acer and told them everything I said in the earlier note, hoping that it may help them.

I'm not sure it's just the bigger power adapter though. The flicker is gone, but my battery charged up to 18% and stopped. I shut the lid over lunch, but that didn't help.

Acer is sending me a new adapter to test....

so ur battery is only charging up to 18%? with which adapater?

Smart Card Reader's 8100's

Make sure your power profiles in Acer Power Management have "Card Bus" set on for smart card reader to work.

Be sure to set your DC powered profiles as well as AC , and it would probibly be a good idea to set them on all DC profiles or you could get locked out of the system if you don't have your AC Adapter.

Ken Shelton
PC Concepts LLC
FatCat Servers

My screen became vertical pinstripes?

Here is a first for me and I don't recall reading this on the posts:

I closed the lid before going to bed on ac power. When I got up the next morning I noticed the fan on as usual if I had been using it. I open the screen and all the stripes!

Had to power down to restart, the drive says all is fine after reboot and the XP checks.

Wow! Are you using that Ray Adams ATI Tray Tool I mentioned? It's the only thing I've had that does that to me. Obviously, check your Power Schem and Advanced option (when closing lid) to see what state it goes into.

Does anyone know what application does this? I had the same thing happen to me on my Sony Z1 and now it's started doing it on the Acer too:

The Task Bar has a pop-up that says "New Updates Available" with a link under it that says "Click Here to View" but you can't get rid of it by clicking on it, because it does nothing. It just keeps popping up and driving me nuts. The icon next to it looks the the "puzzle piece" of a plug-in. The only ones I have installed are Flash and Shockwave.

When I open Windows Taks manager, I saw taskmger.exe was cycling, so I stopped that, but it didn't help. You think it's Firefox related?

I figured it out myself. It's Firefox. I just clicked on one of my extensions and it went and looked for updates and killed the pop-up. How gnarly is that?

Yes I am. I'll check the options that you mentioned.

It was set to go to standby, how about your settings? I changed it to hibernate to see if it corrects it.

It may be the Standby OR Hibernate will exit programs, such as Ray's Tray Tool. Check the Tray Tool, Tools, General Options and be sure Reset Clocks on Exit is UNCHECKED. Also Use New Apply 3D Options is UNCHECKED. Also in Hardware, Overclocking DO NOT click the Calculate or Set Default Clocks buttons, they will flip you into pixelated colors and hard reboot. You probably do NOT want to enable Auto 2d/3d overclocking. This tool is NOT ready for Mobility cards. If it's a problem, uninstall it, it's not worth the hassle.

Tried all your suggestions but to no avail....it's been uninstalled! Thanks again!