Fox

Hi everyone, sorry for the long post, but I have a doozie.

My friend left me his Acer Aspire 1640z to work on the other night. He had previously asked the use of my xp retail disk in lieu of his own because he thought that it might be bad - the installation would freeze at 'installing netwrok' each time. Mine did the exact same thing, so I figured it was a hardware issue and offered to help. It didn't freeze in a typical way though - It stopped making any progress, and the keyboard/mouse stopped responding but that little 'I'm still working' graphic on the bottom right kept on going, and all the blurbs telling me how awesome windows xp is going to be went on.

I tried installing again a few days later, and it reached the same point. I figured at that point that it might be a problem with the laser, so I cleaned it off with some isopropyl. No luck. Next I disassembled it and cleaned all the dust out of it, re-applying thermal grease to the CPU and checking over the fans and heatpipes. I noticed that one of the chips - it's either the northbridge chip or the integrated graphics (my money's on the latter) had no fan, just a smooth copper sink which sits against a steel backplate's thermal pad (the backplate is mounted on the removable plastic plate that you can remove to get to the RAM).

After cleaning out all the coolers (there wasn't much dust at all), I tried it again. No dice.

Then I thought it could be a problem with the cheap Hynix brand ram, so I took those two modules out and subbed in one of my own that I knew was okay. I ran the windows installer again and opened up a command prompt with shift + f10 so I could track whether or not the machine was still accepting input from the kb/mouse and just typed in gibberish around the time where it went through to install the network. It got through that, but froze again, so I pulled the power and restarted. Once it booted back up to the installer, it got all the way through.

By this time, I'm thinking I'm home free. It boots up windows fine, and I go through to put all the drivers and free software on that I usually do.

I got everything installed except the video driver, and restarted. It came back up just fine. Finally, I installed the video driver, and restarted once more, thinking that I would be ready finally to triumphantly return the laptop to my friend.

Well, apparently that wasn't good enough for this machine. The windows welcome screen came up, and it played the boot sound, but the mouse pointer was almost unresponsive (it would skip from place to place about once every eternity). After 10 seconds or so, it loaded the desktop and all the background process. Mouse and KB are both still unresponsive. Hitting the windows key would be met with the start menu after maybe 15 seconds, and moving up and down that menu would take about the same amount of time for each menu element - that's if the machine didn't flat out freeze (or the time to respond begin to approach infinity).

Safe mode worked just fine, but I even after disabling hardware accelerated video, it still isn't booting normally.

I would really appreciate any help on this - the machine's out of warranty now, and I don't want to give up on my friend's machine, because he's hardly used it, and this is a ridiculous behavior.

TriggerFinger

Hi Fox,

As you said, it could be the video chip. My money goes to that component too. I had the same experience but that one totally freeze up when Windows starts or when the GUI starts. Reinstalled XP and it stopped after I entered time/date/location. Sometimes it stopped after entering product ID/COA.

Like you I thought it was RAM. Replaced RAM but still no go. I also thought may be it was the hard drive so I tested the hard drive and found no errors but still I suspect it was the hard drive so I replaced it with a new one... still nothing changed. Finally I ran liveCD (thinking that I have removed the HDD from the list of suspects) but even in linux it behaved the same. That's when I threw in the towel and replaced the motherboard.

So may be it was the northbridge or the video chip or perhaps even the motherboard itself but it was all downhill from there. Problem solved.

Fox

Thanks a lot for your reply, Triggerfinger.

My friend came over last night, and we kept at it - I took the keyboard out, cleaned all the contacts, looked over everything again... and things were working with the keyboard unmounted but connected. I cleaned up, put it back in, put the battery back in, and things stopped working. Then one of us had a hunch that it could be the battery messing things up.

Turns out, with the battery out, it works just perfectly. With the battery in, it has a bunch of issues with the i/o devices and lagging. My brother has an identical machine, and with his battery in there, it worked fine. So, as it turns out, it was the battery the whole time.

My friend had neglected to tell me that the battery he had would only yield about 20 minutes of runtime. I think this was because he let it sit for so long without using it, and it discharged past the point of safe recharge, and probably buggered something up in the controller which caused these problems.

Thanks for the help - hopefully if someone else ever encounters this, they'll find this thread.

Arr, matey, these words be for the engines: Acer Aspire 1640z hangs keyboard mouse don't work freezes freezing battery

TriggerFinger

Wow, imagine what a dying battery could do to a system.

Now it makes me wonder if it is the same with the other brands too.

wwfc_barmy_army

Your kidding me. I've been having the exact same problem with my laptop for the last month or so. Very close to giving up, so i thought i'd give it one last google and i found this. It does appear that it was the battery all along! I've tried everything from ram to wifi cards and nothing worked and it was the battery...

Thanks so much mate, you saved me a lot of money! I'm assuming buying another battery with solve it now, or will it no longer work with any battery?

Thanks again!

Fox

Hey, I'm glad my post helped- my friend faced the same prospects on his as well. We were going to replace the RAM first, motherboard second, etc.... it would have gotten really ugly. And we probably wouldn't have even bothered checking out the battery had I not removed it to get at some screws and then booted the machine up without it.

To answer your question, my brother had the same laptop as my friend, and when I put my brother's battery into my friend's laptop, it worked without any problems. I think a replacement from ebay (where they're maybe 35 or 40usd) would do just fine.

sirado

g,day guys and gals i was just wondering i have a similar problem first of all the screen went black i tryed the usual replaced hard drive no change replaced memory no change moved memory to second memory slot then it worked then 1 day i turned it on but it didnt work but the power light lit up so i had the battery and power in so would that be the problem should i have taken the battery out i now have the machine apart thinking it is the mother board a mate of my brothers who mucks around with computers told me it was the power supply on the motherboard does anybody know the answer to this problem or should i put the thing back together and try it without the battery i dont want to put it back together to find it is the mother board and have to pull it apart again any help would be appreciated thanks

ollie.d.jones

are you sure its the battery - ive been working on this for aaaages now and its killing me!
ive tried 4 different OS installations, all of which fail
some installations work partway and then the keyboard and mouse still doesnt work. tried installing latest drivers but still buggered!
anyway.. trying it now without the battery in to test your theory! hope it works! don't wory, ive touched wood :)
wil let u know!