A fussy, piddly, irritating morning job

[67Dart273]

I've ranted on here earlier, about how crappy Acer support is. It gives a whole new meaning to the term "suckage" and specifically, "Sewage Suckage Services" if you happen to watch "Red Green."




But I did it anyway


In my defense, this laptop, an Acer E1-431, is in REALLY nice shape, shows little use or wear, and I only paid 150 bucks for it. It has Winhozed 7, which I wanted instead of "Windoze hate" and I want to put Linux on part of the hdd

BUT IT turns out that the previous owner left a BIOS PASSWORD on the damn thing, so you cannot change any bios settings, and the "F12" (selectable boot) menu is disabled.

So I of course went to the Acer site, and I just as well have gone out into the backyard and yelled at the moon, for all the effin' good THAT did.

So I find a "hardware manual" on the www, but it's not the RIGHT ONE, and it turns out the only way to clear the bios is to yank the bios BATTERY, I guess.

Finally, I found THIS

http://www.insidemylaptop.com/disassembly-guide-acer-aspire-e1-531-2438/

and..............this video

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STaaLHUH4Ng"]Disassembly Acer Aspire E1 571G 531 Packard Bell TE Laptop Repair - YouTube[/ame]

and sure enough, after removing about "that many screws" THERE is the bios battery.

NO!!!! I did not !!!!! latch the keyboard back in place!!!!! until I knew it actually had worked, LOL

 

[67Dart273]

!!SUCCESS!! Pretty much. Just got done tonight, installed Linux Mint 17 "Mate" desktop, "long term support"

Only glitch is control of display brightness, but I'd already found that glitch, so I think we can fix it

 

[dartnabout]

Over my head!

 

[Bad Sport]

A fussy, piddly, irritating morning job

After reading that, I wasn't real sure I wanted to click on the thread, lmao.

That's funny, I guess those boards operate similar to old payphone boards.

In another life I used to service payphones on the side and sometimes could not get into them to program them. I would have to pull the battery in the board which required taking it apart, and reinstall, and then I would be good to go.

 

[younggun2.0]

oh man. your killin me. i tried to change a watch battery once and got so pissed i put that piece of **** in the micro wave. this is waaaayyyy beyond my skill set.

 

[67Dart273]

The thing that irritates me is lack of Acer support. I've owned MANY (IBM) Thinkpads, before they were "Lenovo." They had some of the best support pages in the industry.

Also, why did Acer have to make getting to this battery so damn difficult?

Only glitch I haven't fixed yet is the brightness control for the display does not work. Everything else worked out of the box.

BadSport, removing a motherboard bios battery is nearly always (but not always) THE answer to when you backed yourself into a corner.......password in the bios, or changed "some setting" and need to start over. There are exceptions, LOL

And for those of us old enough to remember arguing with older PCs, two of the best inventions in the last few years is "USB" and the ability to cold boot to a USB port with "all kinds of " devices, including hard drivers, CD/ DVDs USB memory sticks, etc. and even............floppy drives!!!

All in all, this will make a great spare / backup machine if my main laptop takes a dump.