PredatorHelios500 Devotee

Owner of the previous Helios 500. Here's my feelings about this... This will likely be a great machine. Acer's hardware engineers are awesome. But Acer's customer support is lackluster. You'll get a few BIOS and pre-installed software updates over the next year... and then Acer will just completely forget you and your…

Acer hasn't updated any drivers on the Intel Helio 500 since August 2018. :-(

The suggestion that you put the computer to sleep rather than shutting it down is the most likely culprit but the other suggestions are valid too. Here's another one: Computer today are NEVER actually off unless you are disconnected from the wall and your battery is COMPLETELY dead. All modern Intel and AMD chips have a…

Did you turn off Secure Boot?

On my adapter the detachable cord doesn't fit snugly into the box. This causes me to sometimes be running on battery instead of AC without knowing it until I get a low battery warning. Very annoying.

I read a lot of reviews for NVME drives and the Samsung EVO+ line seems to be the best reviewed.

Some questions: Did you try a live USB version of your OSes first? Did you set the disk mode to AHCI? Did you try toggling Secure Boot to see if it helps? If it is getting stuck before the BIOS, it does not seem like a video driver issue but something related to POST tests.

NVIDIA publishes release notes for each driver update. Most users will want the "Game Ready" driver and the things that interest the user are GENERAL FIXES, GAME-SPECIFIC FIXES, and SECURITY FIXES. Most of changes NVIDIA makes seem to be game-specific. So if they don't apply to the games you play, there is no need to…

PH517-51 only supports 2400 MHz RAM with official BIOS so 2666 RAM won't run at full speed. Doesnt' make nearly as much difference in real world performance as the numbers suggest however so don't fret about the missing MHz.

Agreed. These lights are annoying when watching videos. I put my mousepad over them for a quick fix.

UPDATE: Bought the Predator backpack for 17" laptops. Fits the Helios 500 17" nicely as it should. First impressions: The bag looks great. Seems well designed. Maybe could use a little more padding between laptop and your back. Takes me about 3 to 6 months to get a "real world" opinion on a new backpack or briefcase. One…

The PH517-51 doesn't seem to be affected by the ME vunerablities although the PH317-51 and PH317-52 are. The PH517-51 does however need its BIOS patched to at least 1.14 to fix Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

While it's up, on my Helios 500, there's a considerable delay (5'ish seconds) between plugging in the headphones and when audio is finally routed to them. Don't know why that is.

Not necessarily easy: there are some types of viruses that are extremely hard to get rid of like boot sector viruses.

I beg to differ. A machine with pirated software is far more likely to have malware or viruses lurking on it. I'd consider the machine compromised even if Windows were reinstalled.

You could try the steps in this video https://tinyurl.com/yd7wgpak

No. It is normal. Seems to be a well-known bug in XTU that Intel doesn't want or cannot fix.

Microsoft plans 20 years ahead! Seems like something is seriously wrong. I would be considering a fresh install if you cannot figure it out in the hopes that that fixes it. I would think and hope that none of that thermal stuff you are doing should be necessary. Good luck.

I have only experience with the NVME drive that came with my Helios 500 but I would not expect any storage device to output a significant amount of heat like that any more than I'd expect RAM modules to overheat a system. My gut instinct is that something is wrong. The temps you are reporting, are those CPU temps? While I…

I didn't type the asterisks in "bit-*****". It's one thing to censor posts that promote illegal downloading, as the the Community Agreement, but censoring even the word ***** is annoying. BitTorrent has legal and legit uses. I've never once used it to illegally download anything but I've downloaded just about even Linux…