I have Acer V3-371. It has two issues common to this series (touchpad and wifi). Touchpad was fixed at service (they soldered a ground wire between touchpad ground plane and the chassis), I was trying to fix wifi.
So, there was a BIOS update on the support site (v1.27). I have downloaded and installed it, everything looked fine (there was Insyde update screen) until reboot. The notebook was just stuck at Acer logo, coolers spinning, but didn't react to keypresses and it was impossible to enter EFI setup.
I thought it was a bug in the new bios version and decided to take out the BIOS chip and reflash an older version using a programmer. Image files were extracted from the update executable. I desoldered the chip and put it into a programmer, and before flashing the old version, I tried to verify the contents to check if it was flashed correctly. Surprisingly, there were errors! It looked similar to 1.27 image, but some bytes were different.
There could be a number of reasons causing this: bad data written by the update utility, broken chip and improper update process. I tried to erase the chip completely (this type of memory has to be erased before new data are written) and flashing the same image again and it worked! So my guess is that the update utility doesn't erase the chip before updating. Or something else is broken, it's hard to say for sure. I put the chip back in (initially with wires and a detachable socket to test different versions, then soldered on the board), and the notebook successfully booted.
Ah, and wifi still works [poorly] [word filter avoidance]
I'm still trying to find a solution, it has something to do with the back cover.
Some technical info:
New BIOS version: 1.27
Old version: 1.15
Model: V3-371-59W7
I have attached a screenshot of the flashing program which shows validation errors and a photo of the board with BIOS chip desoldered.
