I thought I’d lost it. One moment it was working and then it wasn’t. Of course it was made worse by the fact that it stopped working for my wife.
Trying to avoid recriminations (!) I switched to the web. The symptoms were bad. The power button light would illuminate, the cpu fan would spin up, the hard disk clicked but didn’t appear to whirr. The screen remained blank.
It looked fundamental.
However, a quick search of the Acer sites turned up a plan A and a plan B!
I have to say the Acer sites are a bit of a mix and the first ones were pretty bad with script failures and non-responsive UI functions.
But then I discovered this. I’ve never heard of resetting a laptop (or netbook) before, but first step to recovery for an Aspire One 110 or 150 is to remove battery, mains connection and then hold the power key down for 30seconds. Then reconnect battery and power and see if it reboots.
My didn’t, so I moved straight on to Plan B which was linked at the booked of Plan A.
To be totally clear this step is only possible on the AOA-110 or AOA-150.
Plan B is reflashing the BIOS. This is pretty cool. Again, apart from mobile handsets I never been able to reflash a BIOS without a booting OS before!
What you do is get the latest BIOS file for the 110/150. Rename the BIOS upgrade file, copy it and the FlashIT utility which are in the DOS_Flash directory of the expanded BIOS zip file.
You copy both of these files to a handy USB stick – the USB stick does not need to be bootable. Plug the USB stick into the netbook.
With the power cable plugged in, you hold down the FN and ESC keys and then press the power key. The power key illuminates, you can release the FN and ESC keys. The power key should then start to flash.
The machine will then reflash taking between 1 and 7 minutes. It took mine about 1minute.
I thought it had failed, the power key didn’t flash for long. But patience, and then the machine rebooted and the familiar screen BIOS frame appeared.
After this, my machine is back to running Window 7 perfectly!
Thank goodness! I don’t have to sleep on the couch tonight.