Monday, December 28, 2009

Acer Aspire One A150 - Black Screen - No Bios Boot

After booting from USB devices (like after installation from LIVE-CD from USB-Stick), Acer Aspire One A110 and A150 often hangs and needs a bios update, to remove black screen of death.


Download actual bios from Acer website. Unzip it, copy the content of the dos-folder to the root of a FAT16 or FAT32 formatted usb-stick. Now you have a flashit.exe and a ****.fd. It's good to use a usb-stick with activity-le, to see, if somethings happens.
Make a copy of flashit.exe and name it flash.exe - one of them is called by the pre-bios-flasher later. Then you have to rename ****.fd to ZG5IA32.fd.
Power of the netbook, make shure you inserted battery pack and ac-plug - both is needed. Insert usb-stick in netbook.
Then hold FN and ESC-key simultaniously and power on - the power-button will now blink to show you, that the pre-bios-flasher is active. Release FN-ESC and press the power button again - now it will check your usb-stick and start updating the netbook. If that happens, the usb-stick will blink for some time. Don't do anything with your netbook at this time - wait for reboot, now bios should boot regulary.
If your netbook does not reboot after, let's say 5 minutes and usb-stick is not blinking any more, something went wrong with the bios update.


Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Huawei E220 64 bit Update does not work under Windows 7

Last days i tried to update the firmware of my E220 from Huawei to be 64bit compatible.
So i downloaded the latest firmware update of the Huawei Website - but my plugged in E220 was not found by the flash routine. After some try-and-error i found out, that the update does not seem to work under Windows 7 32bit, althought the device was installed successfully before.
So i tried it under XP 32bit and it worked perfectly.

Backup preinstalled PowerDVD 8.1 from Acer Aspire 1810TZ

I wanted to remove my preinstalled Windows 7 64bit installtion because of 64bit driver issues. But i didn't want to loose my preinstalled PowerDVD 8.1.

I found out that the installation files are deposited under a hidden folder at C:\OEM. To make the folder visible go to the control panel / folder options and activate "Show hidden files, folders, and drives". Restart Windows Explorer and search for a directory called PowerDVD in the OEM-folder.

You backup this folder to a usb-stick.

After Windows 7 32bit installation i run the installation from usb and it worked!