Acer Aspire One owners – beware!

Those itty-bitty AA1s are real cute. Most of us have them by now, as they are fairly cheap. And “cheap” usually stands for “trouble”. So, when you want to set the BIOS password, there’s a bug that can give you a heart attack: you have to supply your password with CAPS LOCK on, even though it was off, when you set it up. Though, if it was on at the time, then your little netbook may not boot at all. Here’s how I got around it. First, I figured it would be a lot more efficient and secure at the same time, if I disabled my Windows password and enabled the BIOS security lock. And so I do that, saved changes and restarted my computer. Then I type in the password that I just set up, and it’s not accepting it. A few minutes of googling around told me of the CAPS LOCK bug on this model. Nuisance, of course, but works for some. I intended to come up with a workaround and reset the password to all caps. And on the next boot the computer was dead. The only other option was to flash the latest BIOS in an “emergency mode”. That is, you get a USB flash drive, (using another computer with Internet access) format the drive into FAT16, download and extract contents of this archive to the root directory of the newly formatted drive, rename the file zg5_3310.fd to ZG5IA32.FD. Then attach the flash drive to a USB port of your netbook, turn it off, press the “function” and “escape” keys simultaneously and hold them down. Press the power button while still holding those two keys down to turn the computer back on. Be sure that you have both the battery and the power cord connected, by the way. Now the power light should be flashing and you can release your grip. Firmly press the power button once again and the computer should start the BIOS upgrade. The power button will continue to flash, as well as the activity LED on your USB flash drive, if it has one. When it’s done, your computer will reboot and that should resurrect it. You will still have to enter your password with CAPS LOCK on, though, so keep that in mind.