Acer Aspire S3 Freezing

GaryHeart

I've seen a few people mention this problem around the interwebs, but have yet to find a solution.

 

I just bought my Acer Aspire S3 with Windows 8 about a week ago. I've already had one complete system freeze and had to do three forced restarts (at the power button).

 

The first time, Windows froze up while I was running firefox with a few tabs open- nothing else running. The screen froze and I couldn't start task manager or do anything else.

 

On another occasion, Windows started to update with no warning, and then spent the entire day preparing to shut down without ever actually managing it.

 

Is this a Windows 8 problem or a Windows-with-Acer S3 problem? Like I said, I've seen others mention it with this model. Any suggestions?

Tommy-Acer

I'm not aware of an issue with "freezing".

 

Have you attempted to reset the system back to factory defaults, to see if there is a particular piece of software that might be causing the issue?

firemann

Not sure I have had a total freeze, but I regularly find nothing happens for some time when I am loading a program or other activities. Sometimes 30 seconds or more before machine responds.

 

Other time it's fast, but I wonder what has happened at other times. I hit the button again and end up loading several copies.

 

Igetfedup

I bought my Aspire S3 in June 2013 and it took about a month of erratic activity such as you describe, including "freezing", before it settled down. I started watching closely when things happened and came to the conclusion that it had to update Windows 8 practically from scratch. The list of windows updates in the updates log was immense!

 

Those times when it was  "preparing to shut down" but never did were probably when it was trudging through registering all those updates into the system files. Fortunately I had my power setting set to shut down when I closed the lid so after waiting all day (as you said) on two occasions, I lost patience and closed the lid. The system later rebooted okay.

 

Those problems ceased occurring just as magically as their onset was. Unfortunately, I now after only three months have a bigger situation: the adapter will no longer power the notebook nor recharge the battery; Acer support said it was just the cable and replaced it but it still does not work, so I basically have a dead duck on my hands when the battery gets totally depleted again, which will be in about a day or so.

 

Also, while I was at the library one day using their free wifi, I met another guy who had just bought an S3 and he was having the same constant updating and freezing problem as you and I did, so I'm pretty sure it must be a problem with this particular model or the Windows 8 that was loaded to them, as that problem seems software related, not hardware.