I scored a great deal (or so I thought) on an old acer laptop to play/dj music at my brotherlaws wedding in 2 weeks. I loaded a cool dj program that worked good and almost 10 gigs of music on to it. The thing worked great except it occasionally was overheating. I searched the internet and multiple sites including acers site told me that updating the bios will fix the problem. So I downloaded the official bios for it and followed the directions exactly but right away I get a "bios failed" message and when trying to power down, it locks up. Now when I try to turn it on, theres no fans spinning, no error screen, no lights- NOTHING. I thought if I could get to and yank the battery that it may work but after reading up on it, it's very common for this to happen to acers and the only fix is to send it in to Acer?!!?!? What kind of bull crap is that? I am assuming there is no fix for this? Just, oh well, it happens, your out of luck...?
 
I guess I'm only out $50 bucks and my brother in law won't have a dj or music for his wedding. Thanks acer. You just made my day.

The bios chip is soldered to the board...Trying the bios recovery with a thumb drive now but it looks like I will probably be out of luck.

agent8

Nope, just a paper weight. Off to ebay to try and get a few bucks. Hours of work down the drain and lesson learned. I'm done with acer and will never try to flash a bios again.

 
  
  
 
agent8,
 
Considering that you mentioned you were going to go to EBay with it, was there anything on that hard drive that may be of importance to you? I ask this just in case someone would get lucky and get it running.

I just listed it without the hard drive. I figured maybe I could find another laptop and have the hard drive as a spare. I think I would be happier saving up for at least an older dual core anyways, that thing was kind of a pig. LOL. Just frustrating because I had all those songs on there and I'm at a loss at what to do for my brother in laws wedding. I don't have the cash to buy a new one. Man, I've been having a string of bad luck latley with computer stuff.

DraginElite

with me if it was overheating I would have checked to see if the heatsink was loaded with dust bunnies or something

I did that too but apparently, the old bios was randomly turning off the fan altogether. It was getting close to 70 degrees and had shut off 3 times already. I bought a laptop cooler but I guess I would rather not have it overheat during the wedding so I took the chance and tred the flash.
 
I'm looking at some $350 Asus laptops that look good. My wife is considering putting one on credit. She is freaking out since we only have 2 weeks. We are fighting and she is giving me the "I told you that laptop was junk" speech. Lucky for me, I was smart enough to store 90% of the music on a flash drive. Otherwise, I'd be sleeping outside.