[D3raNg3d]

Greetings,

I was given an Acer Aspire 5100 and was told that the hard drive might be faulty. Yes he was having problems with it and I am fairly handy with PCs, this is my first laptop project.
Anyways I tried to power up the laptop. There was no post at all, screen was blank but the hard drive light stayed on. Then I tried to reboot it 5 more times then all of a sudden it booted up. After messing around on the desk top for about 30 mins it froze (alt-ctrl-del wouldnt work). Tried to restart then the same as above occured.
I found out that it could boot from a bootable disk. So the next thing I did was run the Hitachi HDD Ultility - it found that the HD was perfectly healthy. Then I ran MemTest86 for 3 hours - no problems found there either. Next I installed Windows XP Home ( Vista Home Premium was previously installed). I managed to get it installed and fully updated and drivers installed ( I cant remember it crashing during that process, if anything it was while installing the drivers). Since then it seemed fine then the crashes came in the form of freezing OR the BSOD (the Blue Screen of Death). Some of the stop codes that I can remember were 50, E8 and the most recent was D5 or D1.

Any ideas or suggestions guys?
Thanks In Advance,

D3raNg3d

System Specs

Acer Aspire 5100
AMD 64 x 2 Dual Core TK-53 796 MHz
1 G ram

Windows XP Home w/ service pack 3

[D3raNg3d]

Ok,

So it seems no one has any ideas on this issue but I will add my 2 cents. From reading info on the net I have come to the comclusion that something on the motherboard is faulty (probably the southbridge). It seems that Acer laptops/notebooks
use really cheap parts espically the motherboard. Add the fact that they get very hot, due to poor design and air flow, the motherboeard gets damaged. I have noticed that they are a few in the market for new Apsire 5100 motherboards. I cant understand why considering they will eventually run into the same problem and they are quite costly at a little over $200.
So I guess Ill hold on to this for parts and learn a little more on laptops by totally taking it apart (no more harm can be done eh?).

Thanks for reading my posts and any comments are still appreciated.

[zyper95]

When the crashes happen do you find if the bottom of the laptop is hot to touch? Also, code D1 usually refer to a hardware failing. Try to check the mini dump file text so we might be able to identify the cause of the crashes.

[D3raNg3d]

Thanks for your reply.

Some of the crashes happen shortly after booting up and the laptop has been off for many hours ( not to mention sometimes it takes 5 or 6 power ups to get it started).
Since my last post I have looked at all the minidumps the laptop has generated D1 only occured once. Most of the stop errors codes are e8 and I have had a few f7's.
The first f7 was related to one of the audios driver the second was the ntfs_file_system. I can post them here if you would like but with the variaty of error codes im not sure which one you would like to see (what would be the best way to do that, copy paste?).
On another note, I have noticed that there are some screws missing from the bottom, would that cause instablility (some devices moving slightly)? I was thinkering with the idea of taking it all apart to see if all the connections are solid but again I am new at laptops.

Thanks

[D3raNg3d]

I think I have found out the problem. I remove everthing that I could from the laptop and made sure there was a solid conection, excluding the processor. When I put everything back I left 1 stick or ram out. The one I had placed back in was in the upper slot and everyhing worked great. Dont really know why I tried this but I then moved the 1 stick of ram to the lower slot and as windows started to boot up it crashed (BSOD).
I reproduced this effect again, working in the upper slot then not working in the lower slot. So I believe the lower ram slot is faulty.
Just wanted to relay this so if anyone in the future has a similar problem this might just be the solution.

Thanks Again