Sunday, February 22, 2009

How to fix an ACER ASPIRE ONE that won't boot due to corrupted bios.

So my wonderful ASPIRE ONE stopped booting after doing a boot from a USB flash drive to test to see if I had setup Ubuntu correctly on it. I would only get a black screen and I could hear the fan cycling up and down but it would never boot. Fortunately I found an article on google by Macles, the problem was fixed within 3 minutes start to finish.

Using a mac I opened the terminal and used:
openssl md5 ZG5*
To verify the checksum, then I just formated my USB to FAT using windows. Followed the instructions below exactly and it worked out fine.

http://sites.google.com/site/maclesblogspotcom/

Acer Aspire One BIOS Recovery

The AA1 has a built-in BIOS recovery routine, making it possible to flash the BIOS even if the system doesn't boot anymore. It's only meant for emergencies and may void your warranty, so use at your own risk.

Follow every step carefully!

First format an USB stick with FAT.

Download the latest BIOS, and put both FLASHIT.EXE and the BIOS file in the root directory of the stick. Rename the BIOS file to ZG5IA32.FD, that's important. Do not remove the USB stick.

Turn the AA1 off, make sure both battery and AC adapter are connected. Press Fn+Esc, keep it pressed and press the power button to turn the AA1 on. Release Fn+Esc after a few seconds, the power button will be blinking. Press the power button once. The AA1 will now initiate the BIOS flash, do not interrupt it under any circumstances. After a while the power button will stop blinking, and the AA1 will reboot shortly after. Wait patiently, this took me about 1 minute and then my computer rebooted just fine.

The BIOS has been flashed and all settings reset to default.

If for some reason you made a mistake during the procedure and it doesn't reboot by itself wait 5 minutes before turning it off, just to be safe that it isn't still flashing the BIOS.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

How to remove YOUTUBE "Videos being watched right now" Unwanted porno

I have been very disappointed with YouTube and the videos being watched right now, I see screen shots from videos that are not family friendly and borderline pornographic.

Now there is a fix! If you are using firefox, install the firefox adblock plus ad-on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Now you can add the filter, right click, block image (another image), no select the custom button and add:
*active_sharing.swf*

The * are used as wild cards to block any url with that flash script. Now when I load YouTube I don't have to see the videos being watched right now :)

-Ben