Acer laptop freezes, modem?

[ptitterington]

I am getting a problem, I am on holiday and am trying to show my fatherinlaw how good his new acer laptop is, unfortunately it locks often when connecting and disconnecting from his dial up connection.

Acer aspire 1310
all xp updates latest acer bios and modem driver.

Is there any better way to reset as he is quite shocked at turning the machine over with all the wires still connected and poking a sharp object in the reset hole. Removing the battery is even harder.

Id like to try and sort before I leave next week. Any suggestions.

Sometimes the screen freezes others it shuts down to a grey locked screen.

It happens either when dialing or when disconnecting, at no other time.

Thanks

 

[Goalie]

You can always press the power button for 5 seconds to force power off....

Try removing the modem from the device manager and letting windows redetect/install it. This will reinstall the driver, and might solve some conflicts. Might not help a bit, though.

Can you be more specific on the modem type so we can search for similar problems?

 

[Rick]

The modem is probably locking up due to IRQ steering / sharing problems.

You should change the power management layer to something like APM instead of ACPI, which will probably fix it (providing it is an IRQ problem), but you'll lose some advanced power management functions. That's kind of bad with a laptop.

What I might try is changing the power management layer to diagnose where that is the problem or not. You can always change it back.

Do change it from ACPI to APM, click Start / Control Panel / System / Hardware / Device Manager


Double click on "Computer" and double click on the device listed underneath. Probably "Advanced Configuration Power Interface ACPI PC".

A window will open, click on the "Driver" tab and then choose "Update Driver". Another window will open.

Select "Install from specific location..." and then select "Don't search, I will choose what driver to install".

You should have two options: ACPI and Standard PC. Choose Standard PC and keep clicking next and OK.

Once you restart your computer, it will redect many system-level devices and will handle IRQs differently than in ACPI. If you truly have an IRQ problem, this will most likely fix it.

Try your modem afterwards and if it works, I would repeat these steps, but instead of selecting Standard PC, choose ACPI again. If you reinstall the ACPI layer, it may iron out the IRQ problems after another restart.

I just recently fixed a freezing modem by changing PCI slots in a desktop system. I've done simliar things many time and I've found changing ACPI to APM fixes these problems very often.

 

[ptitterington]

I,ll try this now,
another odd thing is I have plugged in an optical usb mouse and loaded its software and it works fine apart from the pointer flying occasionally to the other side of the screen, not to any button in particular.

Thanks for the tips

 

[Goalie]

Cheap optical mice are prone to that problem, especially on bad scanning surfaces.

You might find a usb->ps2 adapter, give her a run..

 

[ptitterington]

Well the tips have helped, so far when I thought all was fine it then froze. This was just after I awoke the machine, dont know if this has any relevance.

Btw its a conexant soft 56k modem I also deleted the others that were shown under modems including one on an ir link that I do not have.
Thanks and yes its a cheap optical mouse.