Blast, got in yesterday to find that my beloved Acer Aspire L320 medi PC was dead.
Pretty annoyed as I have seen plenty of cases of these machnes packing up just out of warranty. Guess it was always too much power and therefore heat in small package.
I have used this super, powerful and silent little machine for around 18 months as a media hub driving my Sony Bravia flat screen. A replacement for this form factor PC is pretty hard to find.
The specification of was pretty good: Intel Core 2 duo 1.8GHz, 320GB drive, 2GB RAM, built in DTV tuner, Windows Vista, VGA and DVI video outputs, Ethernet and dual layer DVD writer.
It would drive my Sony Bravia at a full 1080p over HDMI without breakinga sweat.
Going to be difficult to replace this one for a reasonble price (as I recall it cost around £350).
Current candiates include:
Asus EEEBox – Tiny form factor, 1.6GHz Atom based, 160GB drive, up to 2GB RAM, built in wireless.
Looks like a contender but I have seen some videos that indicate its not powerful enough to deliver full 1080p video. It doesn’t have a DVD drive built in which is a bit of a problem when targetting for use as a media PC.
Apple Mac Mini – Small form factor, 2GHZ core 2 duo with 120GB drive, 1GB RAM and a DVD drive, built in wireless and bluetooth for £499.
Compaq CQ2000 – Small(ish) form factor, Atom 230 based, 160GB drive, 1GB RAM and Dual layer DVD writer for £229. This is not an especially small machine being about 1/3 the size of a standard desktop.
Any more ?
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Curious – my Acer L320 died the same day!! also just out of warranty. Third time the mother board has ‘popped’ – now in dispute with Acer and Comet.
The latter more sympathetic than the pathetic response I got from Acer… out of warranty – tough!!
Recon I’ll go back to Compaq much better build quality. My original pocket PC is still working after getting on for 10 years.
CB
Not much we can do about it – I did see someone get £70 for their dead machine on Ebay – I’ll do the same.
I bought the EEEBox B202 to replace it – great machine but rubbish at rendering MPEG2 streams from my USB Freeview tuner.
thats rather strange, mine did the same, JUST out of warranty, i put it down to sods law, but after seeing this blog, there must be a lot more people with the same problem, i am thinknig of just replacing the hard disk with a SSD, not too sire if it will bring it back to life or not, is it worth a try?
Depends on whether your sure its just the disk that has failed – in most cases I have seen it has been the mainboard/processor.
I have taken out the hard disk and memory and used them in other machines I own.
I have replaced the Acer with an Asus EEEBox – £199 from Argos. Not as powerful but a useful media centre PC all the same.
Mine has done the same – and Acer have also advised “out of warranty”. Elsewhere on the web people have commented on statutory rights and that warrantys are one thing, but these things should last longer – you can claim up to 6 years after if an inherrent fault can be identified. From what I’ve read the fault is that these small boxes look fine, but cannot deal with the heat generated in such a small case – or to put it another way – are insufficiently cooled – ie, they have an inherent fault wouldn’t you say?
Anyone had any success with Currys or Acer?
I have the exact same problem with my L320 I think acer should have recalled these machines as the problem seems to be widespread, have just sent mine off to acer going to cost a fair few quid to fix, I got mine from pc world who refused to accept that this fault is widespread
I’ve had my L320 Aspire for just short of 2 years, and last night it gave up the ghost?! It shows there is power going to it, but doesn’t boot up – not even a beep – I also have it connected to my Sony Bravia and have left it on virtually constant over the 2 years, gonna try PC World/Tech guys to see if they can ‘rescue it’, hate to think I might have lost all I had stored upon it!!
Will post back with their comments, so you all will have a clue what to do next!
hi
I am new to comments but very interested in this particular blog of Ian. my daughter also bought a L320 about 2 years ago, tight for space in her small flat seemed like a good idea, etc. recently it died. dad you’re good with pc’s can you fix it. yes I said, how wrong. Like most of your previous comments I too have tried to contact Acer, along with PC World and Microsoft. All pretty dissmissive and none claiming to be able to help. that is unless we part with about £50 first – for an investigation???
I have taken advice from Tradind Standards people and sent a dated letter to Acer asking for sensible repair help. we wait!!!!
Did any of your other bloggers ever resolve the problem
thanks, Allan
Hi Allan,
A pretty common theme here. To my knowledge nobody has had satisfaction outside the warranty period.
Most of the dead L320′s are unrecoverable without mainboard replacement and, as you are aware, its a proprietary design so not economical.
I stripped mine of the hard drive and memory and sold the rest for spares on EBay – got about £60 or so for it. There do seem to be plenty of dead ones around on EBay with the same symptom.
Clearly a design fault with the unit – I believe overheating was the cause of the failure in mine and, I suspect, in most of the others..
@Jackie
hello jackie
I have read ur comments, and as we have had an almost identical situation, I was wondering what your outcome was. I have spoken to both PCW and Acer who both want £50 to check it out as you say a lot of money to spend without knowing the answer.
I look forward to a reply
regards
allan
hi Ian
thanks for reply. I’m learning a lot about this, in the sense that once sold the major players seem to want to vanish. I have trawled the web for answers and it would seem you are correct. the o/htg symptom has been suggested by numerous people. still Acer won’t recognise it. did you know it won a design award in 2007 at a trade show in Taiwan. praised for it’e compact design and “clever piped ” cooling system. I wonder.
I may now give up and strip it as you say, and call it best.
nice talking to you all
allan
I had exactly the same problem 10 months out of warranty. I took it to an independent computer engineer who inspected it (it is the motherboard) and then I sent the report to PC World, quoting EU consumer rights. They replied in 5 days, refunding £275 and the cost of the independent report. I still have the broken desk top + monitor etc.
Stick to your guns with your retailer and you will get there.
Guess you no what I’m going to say, well my acer l320 is dead too, and now I’m stuck with no pc I have tired everything with acer to repair it, but nope no luck they don’t even no a machine they built it’s a joke I won’t be going back to acer again
I like so many other encountered this problem with my Acer a little over a year ago. The IT guy here took a look at it for me and basically said whats already been said on these pages. Its Broke!, I contacted Acer and their parts department to be told that they couldnt help me with a replacement part, not even to buy.
However today having seen this site last week I have some great news and SUGGEST to you all you do this:
I typed my own “engineers” report having spoken to our IT department, I forwarded this to PCW customer service team and quoted the EU thing that midwife was talking about.
PCW called me today having spoken to the engineer and made me an offer in money value to repair the item.
Dont give up if your out of warranty, log the email through their site, they will ask for an engineers report. If you can get someone with a good bit of knowledge to do this for you and then give you a receipt for the work. Then forward this to PCW quoting the EU thing and fill your boots.
So like I say, I got a settlement for a PC that ran out of warranty about 18/2 years ago!!!
Good Luck all!
I have the same issue. My L320 just died last week after using it for two years just for word processing, as I am a writer. My local IT service pronounced it to be suffering from a dead mother board. I did locate a source for a replacement motherboard at a site called http://www.zandparts.com. The price was 250 pounds I think, although i am not sure if that was the currency. I live in Australia so was unsure of the symbol being used. I intend to convert to AUD to see if it is worth the cost. My local IT guys said they could repair my PC if I could source a board. Another company to offer a small form PC is Dell. It is called a Studio Slim Desktop and is very like the L329 in size, performance and appearance. It sells on line in Australia for $399 AUD. This might be another option for Ian.
@Paul Carter
Not sure if this is any help to anyone but any of you who still have your dead L320 in one piece might want to try something…
I read this somewhere, possibly Acer Panam site, some time ago while investigating another problem. The symptoms are – you turn on the L320 and get only the power light coming on. You can hear the fans whirring away, but there is no hard drive activity and the screen stays resolutely blank, not even a standby light. In this situation try the following: -
Unplug the power cable from the back. Press the power on/off switch on the machine for about ten seconds (I usually go for about 20). Release the button, plug in the power lead and then try the L320 again.
This is a known fix for this machine. I recreated the dead L320 symptoms described above recently when I accidentally switched of the mains while it was in the middle of trying to go to sleep. Just unplugging it makes no difference once it is in this state, so if someone takes it a look at it it won’t necessarily make any difference – you have to do the power out/press the on switch thing to clear the problem. Btw, no promises on this, but it can’t do any harm to try..
Midwife/Dave
Can you expand on the EU rights bit? What specifically did you quote?
As might have guessed I currently have an Acer paperweight from PCW out of warranty!
Thanks for your help
I have got 2 units of Acer L320s and both died one time within a year. Subsequently, one of my unit died recently (out of warranty) and they quoted me exorbitant repair price, which I could build a new system with that kind of money. I think it is an inherent design problem with the heat dissipation. I am steering clear from ACER products.
I’ve just had one in for repair and i too pronounced it dead of a mother board fault, but when i return to work i will be trying the power switch test before i completely strip it to locate what exactly on the mobo has cooked. Its a shame they all seem to fail prematurely as its a neat little design, just thinking if they had use a laptop hdd they would have had space for a better cooling system.
Acer usually make well priced products which won’t last forever, but lets face it we are talking about computers which are obsolete in 4 or 5 years not white goods or beds etc. All my acer products have lasted as long as expected.
anyway, i don’t know if the nvidia ION has been released yet but its an atom system with massive graphics power for a tiny media centre pc
regards
I have bought a few replacements for mine – none of which is as powerfull as the L320.
I have plumped for two of the Acer Aspire Revo R3600′s – each with Intel Atom and ION graphics both are used as media heads running Windows 7.
These are great value at £145 each from EBuyer (Linux version – I put Windows 7 on later) although they do struggle with reasonable HD Video frame rates.
I also bought an EEEbox – B02 model – another great little box but slightly less powerful again than the R3600.
hi there i have an acer aspire l320 too and my dvd writer is not reading cds blank or writen it wont burn them either it still burns dvds but wont read them any ideas ?? im really not good with these things also you said that u were runong your tv from it with hdmi can u help me set up mines too?? my tv is a sanyo ce42fd90-b any help would be nuch appreciated
hello Danny
on the back of aspire l320 is a big white connector called “DVI-D” if you have that on your tv then you can directly connect it to this pc with a dvi-d to dvi-d connector. Also i believe you can get a dvi-d to hdmi cable too so if your tv only has hdmi connector on back then try that but not guaranteed to work
I have had two of these L320s go down within two weeks of each other, the first sign appears to be the Ethernet port failing.
As an electronics engineer, I decided to take a closer look.
It does appear that the North Bridge has failed to start. I am currently investigating that a clocking chip on the underside of the board may have failed.
Hi folks, I have the exact same problem with my l320. Purchased it from PCW and shortly after the warranty expired, bang, nothing. HDD seems to boot up but nothing appears on screen. HDD is def working as I took it out and back-up all info using an external 3.25″ drive. I also managed to get a DVI – vga converter but still nothing. think its the MB or graphics card.
Can I ask if Midwifemuse or anyone else out there that has had an “engineers” report whether their own or from an independent engineer is willing to share the report or rather the wording of the report to me. if so please send it to jmckee5602@yahoo.co.uk
I am interested in this report and will chance my arm with PCW if anyone can forward it on to me.
many, many thanks in advance for your help and good luck.
We bought an Acer Aspire L320 from Comet during late December 2007 and after some 2 years and 4 months it failed to boot up.
So we rang the Comet helpline and got told we’d have to take it to our nearest branch and pay £45.00 for an engineers report. We did that, but it actually cost us £59.99 instead.
Anyway we got a call today to say we have a dead motherboard and it’s going to cost over £210.00 to fix it.
After reading all the horror stories here and on other sites, we really don’t particularly want to spend silly money on something that’s likely to fail again pretty soon.
So we rang Acer who didn’t want to know and wouldn’t accept there being an issue with this model and we rang the Comet helpline again who admitted the machine should have lasted more like 6 years and it was unacceptable and so they gave us their complaints department telephone number, but they were less sympathetic and offered us a measly 35% off the repair costs. But with the engineers report fee, we’d still be paying over £200.00.
So next stop is Trading Standards and that is the last Acer product we’ll be buying and we’ll never recommend their products or service to anyone.
We’ve still got our old Tiny desktop PC which is now 10 years old and that still boots up, even though the processor is on it’s last legs.
Plus an Acer Aspire desktop PC that a family member bought new in 1997 and which was given to our local school some 4 years ago is still working fine.
hi anyone got a copy of this report and any info on what EU consumer rights SHOULD BE QUTED please help msn ghanchi2000@hotmail.co.uk
thanx for any help in advance
Hi,
anyone knows how to copy the data from l320 sata hdd to external drive? my acer desktop died a few days ago but the hd is good. I managed to pull it out but do not know how to get the data on it transfered to external hd. any tips on this would be appreciated.
thanks
arb: Maplin (UK) / eBay etc, sell USBSATA adapters which allow you plug the drive into another computer as a USB drive.
Reason I’m here: our Aspire L320 gave up in month 17! So only just out of warranty. Exactly the same symptoms as others have described here and on other sites. We’ve replaced it with a L410, but I’d love to get the 320 working again.
There’s no visible heat damage or any popped capacitors on the top layer of the MB, but I haven’t looked at the underside though.
It seems Acer have let a lot of people down with these machines
Simon.
I’ve got the same problem with my L320 and I’m beginning to think this is a more widespread issue than I first thought .
A repair looks to be a non-starter now due to cost of labour / replacement parts , looks as though I’ve now got myself a useless , dusty paperweight ……… unless of course anyone found a solution ????