I Probably Fried My Aspire One
I wrote about killing my Aspire One some time ago, and ever since it died, I have wondered what might have caused it. I know that Acer replaced the board during the repair, so I figure that something significant must have happened. Well, I have a pretty good hunch that it was me being careless that killed it.
The other day, I went to plug something into the USB port and was having a little trouble getting it to go in. When I started paying attention to what I was doing, I realized that I was trying to put a USB drive into the Ethernet port. It dawned on me that this would totally explain my previous experience when my Aspire One stopped working. If I had plugged my drive into the network port before, it wouldn’t have booted (like it didn’t), and it certainly could have shorted the board out (like something did).
I have learned some interesting things:
-
Apparently I don’t look very closely when I plug in USB drives
-
A USB connector and an Ethernet port are very close to the same dimension
-
Warranty at Acer will repair hardware even if mindless behavior caused the problem
November 20th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Is it powring on? are you sure its not the BIOS got flashed? there are some cases in the aspire community for that and there are some easy fix…
November 20th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Maybe you should change the blog from UMPC Geek to UMPC Moron……
November 21st, 2008 at 9:00 am
Fair enough “Me” - I would be inclined to poke some fun too. I figure we’re all entitled to an occasional goof (although it’s a huge bummer when it ruins your hardware). Here’s to hoping no one else makes the same mistake!
November 22nd, 2008 at 8:27 pm
November 24th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Nah, that’s unlikely to fry your hardware - network ports are fairly robust. In particular, they generally have a transformer between the hardware and the port itself. Doing any damage should take a lot more than inserting a USB connector or similar metal object.
(USB ports, on the other hand, are rather less robust.)
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am
ther not much doubt you had the acer black screen of death !!
its a bios flash issue that acer are aware of and theres a simple fix which is to download the bios file - put it on a usb stick and reboot holding the esc key for 5 seconds,, this flashes the bios and restores the aspire one back to life (mines done it twice )
have a search for aspire one bios flash usb - im sure you will find the way.
T7..
January 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
June 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Back before I got a BSOD in the middle of a bios flash, I’d always end up acidentally jamming my USB devices into the ethernet port of my Acer Aspire 3000, and it didn’t have any problems at all.