Acer Aspire E15 Artifact Crash

HawaiiMike
HawaiiMike Member Posts: 5

Tinkerer

edited August 2023 in 2018 Archives

I purchased an Acer Aspire e15 from Amazon with the I5-8250 CPU and MX150. The unit is 1.6 years old and out of warranty range so no hope of fix or replacement. Over the last three weeks I have been getting progressively worse artifact crashes on the system which cause blinking squares on the display and system lock followed by shutdown. From the research I’ve done online it sounds like the most likely cause is hardware failure by the GPU unit. In my case I figure its the Intel 620 since I can play games for hours on the MX150 with no crashes.


For troubleshooting I’ve done windows updates, NVidia Experience checked the Acer Care tool (no updates listed for me). I even tried to update Intel drivers (suspecting the culprit to be the 620). I updated the Intel Rapid Storage drivers but the 620 Updates wouldn’t install because it stated I was using manufacturer drivers.


When I did a checkdisk I had some disk failures which I ran some DISM commands that seemed to fix that issue. Checkdsk ran with no errors after the DISM followup. But maybe there is a problem with the disk regardless?


I didn’t find any way to disable the 620 integrated to try and save the system using the MX150. About the only thing I can think of would be to rebuild the system with the disk boot partition and then seeing if maybe it was a drive issue?


Any ideas or is it more likely that it is just a hardware failure and there probably isn’t much I can do about it?


Thanks!


Best Answers

  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓
    If not mentioned in the BIOS description, you can go directly to the latest.
    Battery at 100% and AC charger connected.
    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓
    At this point try a windows reset.
    I'm not an Acer employee.

Answers

  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer
    edited September 2019
    is your model the E5-576G?

    if so, there's no way to disable the integrated GPU; by the way artifacts normally are from bad GPU ram and since the 620 uses shared memory, probably can be a bad ram module.
    the MX150 doesn't have the issue since it has 2GB of dedicated ram.

    you can try to do a windows memory check or use an external tool like memtest.

    i suggest you to check your BIOS version too
    https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/support-product/7333?b=1
    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • HawaiiMike
    HawaiiMike Member Posts: 5

    Tinkerer

    Thank you for your suggestions! I'm running memtest right now probably take another hour or so.

    That was my model. I was looking at the bios updates and I'm currently on 1.29.  Do you just update to the most recent one or do you have to do them sequentially.

    Thanks!
  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓
    If not mentioned in the BIOS description, you can go directly to the latest.
    Battery at 100% and AC charger connected.
    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • HawaiiMike
    HawaiiMike Member Posts: 5

    Tinkerer

    edited September 2019
    It's been about a day since I did the testing. Memtest took about three hours did four passes and found no memory errors. However, the artifact crash is still happening. It's random and it happened twice when I left the computer and one just now (three in one day). Since I had to run DISM.exe to recover possible bad bad sectors on my drive (SSD) might it be a corrupted file? Is it worth trying to rebuild the OS portion of the computer. Or is it more likely just general hardware failure and I'll just end up having to replace the unit.

    I also updated the bios to the most current version 1.49 on the Acer model page you linked.

    Thanks
  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer
    Answer ✓
    At this point try a windows reset.
    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • HawaiiMike
    HawaiiMike Member Posts: 5

    Tinkerer

    Thanks, trying that now but trying to start the Acer Recovery Management app (which is installed) won't work. Just hangs while starting. I also tried using the Alt+F10 method while booting but it just goes straight into Windows 10. Is there any way to go into recovery tool from boot?
  • HawaiiMike
    HawaiiMike Member Posts: 5

    Tinkerer

    Ah last ditch effort, but most likely this unit is gone or soon will be. I finally rebuilt the unit. Was able to go into Acer Recovery with Alt+F10. Rebuilt the computer with complete drive wipe. Managed to get it running for five whole minutes before another artifact crash :-( . 

    Now I've took out the additional memory I brought and secondary hard drive to give it one more try. 

    Thanks for all the help though!
  • Odehh93
    Odehh93 Member Posts: 4 New User
    Hello bro i have the same problem..and still havnt resolve it..technicians said its a hardware faluty after they tried everything with softwares..and now they gonna change the chipset for mx150... did ur problem solved ?