Re: iconia w3 battery activation time???

supercustom

Hi everyone, and thanks to all here for many good ideas. But I have not been able to solve my battery issue yet. I've done the BIOS upgrade, including reverting to 1.04, then updating to 1.05, then 1.07, and hasn't helped. Actually, a strange thing happens. After I update to 1.07, my orange LED stays on solid for about 45 minutes, then starts flashing again. So it looks OK but really isn't. And of course, the battery still has no charge and I can only run on AC. I turn the power off during this time so it is not trying to run and charge at the same time, but no difference. One more thing that is different than what others describe here - at no time does the tablet appear to do a separate battery firmware update after the BIOS update. Should it? Some have reported this. If this was unique to BIOS 1.06, does anyone have a copy of this, as it is not available from the ACER drivers page (and I can't find it anywhere via google)? Or is the battery firmware built into any of the other driver update packages? Any other ideas greatly appreciated. 

billsey

I am thinking you have an actual hardware issue with your battery. Your symptoms are just too pervasive to be the calibration issues others have seen, the the BIOS updates affect.

supercustom

SOLVED it.

 

I'm very happy to say I have it working now. I had tried just about everything suggested here and in several other threads/forums, but without success. Most importantly, just updating the BIOS to 1.07 didn't do it. Thought I really might have a bad battery, but it's now fully charged and running without the AC connected. Here's what I did (in case this might help anyone else) - and I have no idea which, if any, of these steps was 'the difference'.

 

Befroe starting any system update/modification, I actually opened up the back of the tablet to visually check that the battery was connected properly. Just to make sure, I unplugged it and plugged it back in. I really have no idea whether this 'does' anything, but as far as I know, it might have helped.

 

Everything else I did was 'software':

 

One more thing I should mention at the outset is that every time I turned the tablet off (for example before going into the bios) I would use the longer "Settings" - "Change PC Settings" - "General" - "Restart Now" (under "Advanced Startup") - "Turn Off Your PC".

 

First, I downloaded the driver updates from the ACER support site (v 1.01 and 2.00), and the BIOS updates (v 1.04, 1.05, and 1.07 - though you don't need this last one) using a separate computer, and put them on a flash drive so I could copy them to C:\ on the W3.

 

If you're still on BIOS v 1.04, you can skip this step. I modded the BIOS v 1.04 install file the same way that others have described to revert to 1.05 because I had already updated to 1.07 (involves changing a flag in "platform.ini" within the CHEETAH_BIOS_V1.04 install file). Before flashing the bios, I went into the current bios and set a supervisor password (the system will retain this password throughout the additional bios updates) so I could restore the security settings, and disabled FTPM. Then I ran the CHEETAH_BIOS_V1.04 (modded version, because I had already updated to 1.07) which I had copied to C:\.

 

Next I went into the bios again, and set the system date to Sept 10, 2013. This was a solution to a previous attempt at this where I ended up with an error "C:\OEM\Preload\Command\AlaunchX\AlaunchX.exe", "A referral was returned from the server" later in this process. Changing the system date in the BIOS to something just before Sept 14, 2013 fixes this.

 

Then I did a restore of Windows 8 using a USB DVD drive and the factory recovery DVDs. The ACER instructional video on system restore says to go into bios and disable secure boot before doing this. I forgot that step, but it seemed to work fine anyway. Not much to say about this part of the process except that at one point I got dialog box titled "System Preparation Tool 3.14", but I just left everything at default settings and hit OK. Seemed to work. I still don't know what the options here would do. Also, I didn't connect to my router during this install. I opted to "connect to the internet later" (or whatever that was called) so that Windows wouldn't do anything automatically that I didn't know or didn't want.

 

Next, went into bios again and did the same security setting restore and disable FTPM (set a supervisor password to do this, if you haven't already), then I flashed BIOS v 1.05 (again from C:\), and after reset, I updated drivers with package 1.01, then 2.00 (also ran these from C:\). Again, I went back into bios and reset security settings and disable FTPM. After this was done, I connected to my router so the tablet was online for the final update - I used the Acer Live Updater to update to BIOS v 1.07 - I have no idea if this makes a difference, but I think I read somewhere that doing it this way will result in a battery firmware update also being applied. This was what I needed to see. After trying all the other fixes I could find in threads here and elsewhere, I never got the battery firmware to update as a separate item. Following the steps here, the battery update tool finally ran (automatically after the BIOS 1.07 was flashed and the tablet rebooted).

 

For those who might have had a similar experience, I was really getting frustrated because doing the fixes mentioned elsewhere actually appeared to work, at first, but then failed. So before doing all this method, but just doing a more simple upgrade to BIOS v 1.07, my orange light did stay on steady at first, but only for about half an hour or so, then would start flashing again, and of course the battery was still dead and hadn't taken any charge. At other times, I didn't get any orange light at all, even though the AC was plugged in. The steps above might seem like overkill, but it's the only method that finally worked for me. After the final reboot, I then turned my tablet off and left it charging. The orange light stayed on until it turned blue. I unplugged the AC and my tablet turned on under battery power for the first time in its life - and it runs fine!

 

By the way, I never got anywhere with trying the hardware reset with a paperclip in the hole beside the SD slot, that others said worked.

 

So now I can stop watching those W3-810 batteries on eBay! I hope this helps someone else.

billsey

Great news!