Acer Aspire 5740G Owners Lounge

[ka4o_pi4a]

@ scud_svk - I use Arctic Cooling MX-4.

@ downloads - Why you don't show me this review before 2 weeks :P

I'll put back my old i5 and put the i7 for selling.

[jamesensor]

Hello friends.

First time here, owner of this laptop too. I'd like to share a thing with you and see what's wrong with this hardware.

I have set my laptop with windows 7 and ubuntu: boot partition, windows, ext4 ubuntu and a backup partition in ntfs. Anyway, I started to have boot problems inside windows in the login area, then some errors about disk writing... so i went in ubuntu and checked disk errors in SMART tests with disk utility. It has some errors and sent it to warranty. They replaced the disk, but I'm starting to have errors again in this test, but it's still healthy.

Here's a piece of the report.

http://i54.tinypic.com/e7f0xy.jpg

Does anyone has disk problems with this laptop? I don't get it. I don't do crazy stuff in it, I just partitioned and have dualboot. Occasionally I reinstall ubuntu but that's it.. Also, what do usually cause disk errors in laptop handling?

Thanks.

[Sxooter]

What errors exactly? Can you screen cap the part with errors?

[jamesensor]

What errors exactly? Can you screen cap the part with errors?

some "!" messages after login on windows (I think it was like starting services and stuff), and the login took ages to happen too, with the cpu usage light on and intermittent repeated loop blinks. Took it to warranty and they replaced the disk, since even in the store i bought the hardisk regen software found errors and crashed the system. When I got the laptop back, i checked no errors in ubuntu's disk utility, so everything is running perfectly now, but lately I went check again and I saw the same kind of errors in the report. However, no red errors showed up like in the replaced disk... yet, i guess.

I'm just wondering what could I be doing wrong that caused these problems... i had an hp laptop and so does still my brother too with years and none of this happened even though we gave them the same usage.

[downloads]

@jamesensor

Please post a full SMART report. It's hard to judge from just a few attributes that are visible (although those look OK at first glance).

[jamesensor]

Sure, here it is:

http://i55.tinypic.com/inwsv6.jpg

and here's the disk partitioning config:

http://i52.tinypic.com/s45llh.jpg

as I said, the laptop is running fine since I got it back from warranty and when it came the test showed no errors. Then lately I went check again just to see how it was doing and it showed all these errors.

Regards

[downloads]

Two things that don't look good- RAW read error rate and load/unload cycle count. It's WD drive which tend to part their heads way too often- 214921 times in 70.4 days (which is almost 1700h) means roughly every 30 seconds.
That will not help HDD's longevity.

G-sense error is hard to understand at the moment- I don't know which way it should go.

Can you verify that data with another application i.e. HDTune (Windows only)?

[jamesensor]

here's the hdtune report

[garfieldncheese]

how is the performance of the witcher 2 on the 5740g with i5 430m and 1gb 5650m?
anyone tried to play it on this laptop??

[downloads]

@jamesensor

I wasn't able to figure out which way G-sense error should go. I found values both closer to 100 which would indicate that current value should go down while data up and but also found drives which seem to suggest it's the other way around, so I bravely gave up on this one

What happens in my opinion is your Linux installation tends to write a log files (probably to /var/log/*) which as I understand it happens every 30 seconds.
This increases load/unload count shortening HDD's lifespan hence RAW read error rate increasing. RAW read error rate going up is a sign of a HDD that's gonna fail mechanically.
Your HDD parks its heads every 28 seconds meaning 127 events an hour.
As mentioned here this value should be near 15 or lower to be considered reasonable.
To sum it up- you shouldn't use WD drives which are known for very aggressive power management or use software that disables APM (both in Windows and Linux)