Saturday night my Acer Aspire One netbook stopped during a reboot, sat there with power light on and the fan running, no screen (not even the BIOS copyright) or booting sounds

I was lucky in that the Bangalore Acer Service Centre is just round the corner from the office and the machine was still in warranty. The man fixed it in a few minutes, BIOS had 'forgotten' (his words), he re-flashed it from a memory stick.

Now, being a nosey chap I did a web search and came up with this site containing recovery instructions, handy if your machine goes belly-up and it's out of warranty or you're miles from the service centre. Here http://www.qrpcw.com/2009/01/acer-aspire-o...s-recovery.html

Apparently the later versions of the BIOS don't have this issue so an upgrade would be a smart move even if your machine is in perfect health

Saturday night my Acer Aspire One netbook stopped during a reboot, sat there with power light on and the fan running, no screen (not even the BIOS copyright) or booting sounds

I was lucky in that the Bangalore Acer Service Centre is just round the corner from the office and the machine was still in warranty. The man fixed it in a few minutes, BIOS had 'forgotten' (his words), he re-flashed it from a memory stick.

Now, being a nosey chap I did a web search and came up with this site containing recovery instructions, handy if your machine goes belly-up and it's out of warranty or you're miles from the service centre. Here http://www.qrpcw.com/2009/01/acer-aspire-o...s-recovery.html

Apparently the later versions of the BIOS don't have this issue so an upgrade would be a smart move even if your machine is in perfect health

Similar method available for the Asus Eee machiens, just put the bios on a USB stick and make sure the bios name matches the model (ie '901.rom', '1000h.rom') and hold alt-F2 when booting.