Acer Spin SP513-52N sound delay and power issues

Hello, I have an Acer Spin 5, I've done all the updates on it and I've got the latest drivers and BIOS.

Despite this though, I have some issues that have been persistent through it all, hopefully you guys can help!

1. When the laptop goes to sleep after a period of inactivity (On Battery power, turn off after X minutes), the Laptop will not wake back up. The fan will continue to run but nothing will happen and the screen will not turn on at all. It is unusable.
Is there a fix?

2. Ever since I had the machine, the audio has never worked properly. The issue is when you plug in some headphones/earphones, the audio will not play through them until after a 2 second delay. The same happens in reverse. When you remove the headphones, the audio will not play through the speakers again after a 2 second delay. This is pretty frustrating as it means there's a period where there's just no audio at all. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix?

3. I updated my BIOS and Windows recently, and since then I've found that Chrome just won't play audio. Audio will be working on the machine, but Chrome will just be muted for no real reason. Chromium has the same issue, it was completely fine just a day or two ago.

Thank you.

Accepted answers

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JackE

(1) Windows power plans are notoriously unreliable. Change your power plan to balanced mode and all battery and plugged in settings set to NEVER. And change all the power button settings to sleep, none to hibernate or shut down.

(2) All my laptops have this delay. Some more or less than 2 seconds.

(3) Use FireFox.

Jack E/NJ

Fishy

JackE said:

(1) Windows power plans are notoriously unreliable. Change your power plan to balanced mode and all battery and plugged in settings set to NEVER. And change all the power button settings to sleep, none to hibernate or shut down.

(2) All my laptops have this delay. Some more or less than 2 seconds.

(3) Use FireFox.

Jack E/NJ

Thanks for the response.
1) Surely setting my Laptop to never sleep unless I manually do it isn't really an actual solution? Auto screen turn off/auto sleep are vital features, and they worked fine on the machine before. I can't imagine there's no fix to what's a pretty major issue.

2) Are they all Acer laptops? I've never had a device that's done this. Laptop, Mobile or tablet. It's a significant delay where there's just no audio whatsoever, on all my other devices the switch is pretty instantaneous

3) The problem is actually different to what I described. It seems audio across the board just stops working on my machine. I've tried Chrome, Firefox and even local videos through VLC. Audio simply will not play after booting. Any idea what this might be? I tried downgrading the BIOS but that doesn't seem possible, I have the latest audio drivers and this only seems to have started after I updated those, but I updated them around the same time I updated Windows so i'm unsure what the root cause is. Is there any way to downgrade my audio drivers? I couldn't do it through device manager.

JackE

(1) They worked fine before 'what'? If you're not sure 'what', then I suggest a full erase everything ACER cold boot reset.

(2) 2 HPs and 2 ACERs. They all need a few moments to disable the internal speakers, identify which headset or headphone was plugged in, and finally enable the headphone. My desktops work the same way. It's NOT seemingly an instantaneous process.

(3) As with (1) above, a full erase everything ALT+F10 factory reset may resolve the issue. The only unknown is the effect of the firmware change, which unless there was an issue it specifically addressed, are usually not recommended due to the risk of adverse side effects or worse.

Jack E/NJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpzLJRAZldA

Fishy

JackE said:

(1) They worked fine before 'what'? If you're not sure 'what', then I suggest a full erase everything ACER cold boot reset.

(2) 2 HPs and 2 ACERs. They all need a few moments to disable the internal speakers, identify which headset or headphone was plugged in, and finally enable the headphone. My desktops work the same way. It's NOT seemingly an instantaneous process.

(3) As with (1) above, a full erase everything ALT+F10 factory reset may resolve the issue. The only unknown is the effect of the firmware change, which unless there was an issue it specifically addressed, are usually not recommended due to the risk of adverse side effects or worse.

Jack E/NJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpzLJRAZldA

1) Worked fine when I got the machine, it's since updates that it's stopped working, though I'm not sure which so I guess the cold boot reset is my only option? I'd have thought there'd be another fix. Thanks for the video link though, will follow that to do the reset when I can.

2) Do they all use Dolby Audio? I have a Laptop that's probably 15 years old at this point, and it doesn't have this delay, as I said, none of my devices do, this is a first. The delay is too noticeable and there's a significant period of just no audio as the device makes the switch. I have another HP Laptop that also isn't this bad. It may not be completely instantaneous, but it's far quicker than my Acer to the point it isn't noticeable.

3) Thanks again. Does Acer not list older drivers anywhere? I'd rather reinstall older audio drivers to try fix this as at the moment I can't really do a reset since backing up and then reinstalling all my programs would be a significant undertaking

JackE

You can first try an ALT+F10 refresh while saving your personal files. Not as good a test as an erase everything reset though. No dolby on my laptops. Just plain vanilla audio adapters. My fastest audio switcher is a quad. The others are duo. As for older drivers, if you know and google the version numbers, they sometimes show up. You could also try something like iobit's DriverBooster freeware to see if it picks up anything. Jack E/NJ

billsey

I'd guess one of the newer updates changed the power saving settings in such a way that the audio subsystem has to power back up separately from the OS when waking from sleep. We used to see it in earlier W10 updates where the keyboard wouldn't work until you pressed a key to wake it up. Use Device Manager to see if any of the audio drivers are set to allow the OS to power them down.

Fishy

billsey said:

I'd guess one of the newer updates changed the power saving settings in such a way that the audio subsystem has to power back up separately from the OS when waking from sleep. We used to see it in earlier W10 updates where the keyboard wouldn't work until you pressed a key to wake it up. Use Device Manager to see if any of the audio drivers are set to allow the OS to power them down.

Thanks. I did look in device manager, couldn't find a Power Management option for the audio drivers. Luckily though I had a download of the previous drivers still on my machine and after installing them the issue of non working audio is thankfully resolved.
I think the installer for the latest drivers might be bugged or something, it prompts me to restart to uninstall the current ones, but once it does restart there's new drivers installed and it just prompts me to restart again. After the 2nd time it does work though, but it also has the aforementioned issue

JackE said:

You can first try an ALT+F10 refresh while saving your personal files. Not as good a test as an erase everything reset though. No dolby on my laptops. Just plain vanilla audio adapters. My fastest audio switcher is a quad. The others are duo. As for older drivers, if you know and google the version numbers, they sometimes show up. You could also try something like iobit's DriverBooster freeware to see if it picks up anything. Jack E/NJ

Couple of updates. I found that you can actually get rid of the audio delay when switching between headphones/speakers. It's a problem with Realtek drivers, if you install Microsoft's High Definition Audio Device drivers instead of them, the switching becomes instantaneous with no delay. Audio also sounds fine.
Unfortunately using Microsoft's drivers mean you can no longer use Dolby Audio enhancements, so it's not ideal as I quite like the Dolby enhancements as they give a big boost to the Speaker audio on this Laptop and have had to revert to the Realtek drivers. So still no luck here and the problem persists.

I've tried some things to see if there's a way to fix the sleep issues, but it's too early to tell if they've worked as it can be pretty spontaneous.

JackE

>>>switching becomes instantaneous with no delay. >>>Unfortunately using Microsoft's drivers mean you can no longer use Dolby Audio enhancements>>> So still no luck here and the problem persists. >>>>

Compromises! Have tried throwing iobit's DriverBooster at it yet to see if it picks up anything other than the generic MS stuff? Jack E/NJ

Fishy

Was my post removed? Can't see it anymore.
Gist of it being the power/sleep issues have become worse. Tried loads of things, can't find previous VGA Display drivers in case it might be that.
Seems like the Laptop doesn't actually enter sleep mode but gets stuck in a state right before sleep which you can't move it from without a hard reset holding the power button. Sleep seems to work if you press the power button, but not if you close the lid or after a period of inactivity

JackE

>>>Sleep seems to work if you press the power button, but not if you close the lid>>>

Open ControlPanel power button app again. Does it still look like the image below? Jack E/NJ

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/fd/foldho58hv9c.jpg

Fishy

JackE said:

>>>Sleep seems to work if you press the power button, but not if you close the lid>>>

Open ControlPanel power button app again. Does it still look like the image below? Jack E/NJ

Yeah that's how it is, all configured to do the same thing but simply does not work in practice.
Sometimes I've just had the laptop switch off for no apparent reason when trying to enter sleep. I thought I fixed it just now by reinstalling the chipset drivers, but a restart or two later and the problem is back. Really just a painful experience. Constantly lost stuff I've got open. What's worse is it randomly works and randomly doesn't, so I can't easily test if I've fixed the issue.

Like I said, it seems to get stuck when actually trying to enter sleep. The device seems to stay on, they keyboard backlight will work, videos might even resume in the background, but nothing shows on the screen and everything is unresponsive. Is there any way to make the device "hibernate" instead after a period of inactivity? Not really a fix though

JackE

>>>Yeah that's how it is, all configured to do the same thing but simply does not work in practice.>>>

Not unusual. Other models also exhibit this quirky behavior esp when set to fast boot. Have you tried disabling fast startup in ControlPanel's power button app? Then shutdown and turn it back on again? Jack E/NJ

Fishy

JackE said:

>>>Yeah that's how it is, all configured to do the same thing but simply does not work in practice.>>>

Not unusual. Other models also exhibit this quirky behavior esp when set to fast boot. Have you tried disabling fast startup in ControlPanel's power button app? Then shutdown and turn it back on again? Jack E/NJ

Other Acer models also have the problem of the machine just not sleeping right at all?
I have tried that yeah, I've toggled so many different options at this point. Fast boot isn't even on right now, hybrid sleep has also been toggled.

JackE

>>>Other Acer models also have the problem of the machine just not sleeping right at all? >>>

Generally not behaving according to the settings whether it be sleep, hibernate , turn off or do nothing. Not just ACER laptops either. Sometimes happening right after a major Win10 update. Jack E/NJ

Fishy

Still haven't managed a fix. Set the Laptop to Never Sleep, made only the Power button send the machine to sleep and closing the lid set to hibernate.
It still somehow exhibited this behaviour and refused to wake up. Honestly a complete joke.

JackE

>>>closing the lid set to hibernate.>>>

This is usually a no-no. Set closing the lid to do nothing, not hibernate nor sleep. However, make sure that when you closing the lid, the screen actually turns off. Jack E/NJ

Fishy

Thanks for the tip. Here's a laugh though. Using Hibernate can cause the touchscreen to get completely disabled. What a terrible experience.

Fishy

And not only does the touchscreen get disabled, so do all my USB devices. Any idea why that might happen?

JackE

As I indicated earlier, hibernate is usually a no-no. That means to avoid using it. It's part of the ControlPanel power button app that is notoriously buggy. I didn't write its code. Some Microsoft wonk did. So no, I don't know why that might happen. And what's really scarey is the wonk probably can't explain it either

Jack E/NJ

Fishy

Well then, I guess Hibernate goes too. But see, now that means all I can rely on is Sleep. But Sleep is completely inconsistent. It seems absolutely random as to whether my device will wake up or not. So what should I even be doing if I want to put my Laptop to rest? Powering off is not an option.

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