I woke up this morning and picked my linux-based Acer Aspire One and powered it on. I had not used it for a while and in fact do not even remember the last time I worked on it.
Nothing happened... I plugged the AC supply and it booted. I thought the battery was dead and if I left it to charge it would return back to normal. I returned after lunch to check it out but the battery was still dead and it relied on the AC to run.
I did a Google search to find that many souls were worried about their netbooks showing similar symptoms. On one of the discussion threads on fixya.com I found that my BIOS was out of date. The BIOS on my system did not charge the battery if it ran too low. So I prepared USB bootable drive by putting the latest version of BIOS, 3310, and another software called FLASHIT.exe.
As the name suggests the latter reflashed my system when I plugged in the USB drive on my dead netbook, pressed Esc+Fn together, powered the netbook on, released the Esc+Fn and then pressed the power button again. Some lights came on but the screen was blank until after about ten minutes when everything came to life and the system booted.
The batterry took a couple of hours to charge up and now the netbook works even when the AC power is switched off.
The next trouble was the network connection... it did not connect to the network and I was unable to turn on the network manager. fixya.com came to rescue once more where it asked me to get rid of a directory by rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/networking and rebooting the machine.
I did so, and now the netbook seems working alright!
Nothing happened... I plugged the AC supply and it booted. I thought the battery was dead and if I left it to charge it would return back to normal. I returned after lunch to check it out but the battery was still dead and it relied on the AC to run.
I did a Google search to find that many souls were worried about their netbooks showing similar symptoms. On one of the discussion threads on fixya.com I found that my BIOS was out of date. The BIOS on my system did not charge the battery if it ran too low. So I prepared USB bootable drive by putting the latest version of BIOS, 3310, and another software called FLASHIT.exe.
As the name suggests the latter reflashed my system when I plugged in the USB drive on my dead netbook, pressed Esc+Fn together, powered the netbook on, released the Esc+Fn and then pressed the power button again. Some lights came on but the screen was blank until after about ten minutes when everything came to life and the system booted.
The batterry took a couple of hours to charge up and now the netbook works even when the AC power is switched off.
The next trouble was the network connection... it did not connect to the network and I was unable to turn on the network manager. fixya.com came to rescue once more where it asked me to get rid of a directory by rm -rf ~/.gconf/system/networking and rebooting the machine.
I did so, and now the netbook seems working alright!
The performance of this netbook became so crappy that I had to install Ubuntu 10.0 on it without any bells and whistles. It seemed to work well for a while but then went back to its sleepy self again!
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