Following Alyssa's great post , Michal Pelszyk make a very profitable comment :

There's easier way using bootable Linux CD. Boot from it (note: pure text interface is enough). 

When it finishes loading: 

cd /mnt 

mkdir acer 

mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/acer 

cat /tools/aimdrs.dat 

voila, your password. 

Warning: on newer notebooks with SATA drives replace "hda1" with "sda1".

SanDisk has had SSD UATA 5000 1.8" drives on the market for a year now at both 32 and 64-gigabyte (GB) storage capacities. These small SSD drives are designed to be a drop-in replacement for the hard disk drive, it delivers far superior durability, performance and power efficiency - keeping mobile PCs working optimally in the toughest of conditions. At the International CES 2008, we spotted the SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 1.8", with an impressive 72-gigabyte (GB) of flash memory on board this 5th generation SSD.

The move to a SATA inteface means that the SSD is thinner, which means that mobile devices can be smaller. SanDisk informed us that the SSD SATA 5000 1.8" has been trimmed down in size and weight to fit inside new, sleek laptops. It measures only 5mm in height, and weighs less than 45 grams. With SATA drives being thinner it might only be a matter of time that UATA drives will be phased out. With no moving parts, SSD does not need to spin up into action or to seek files in the way that conventional hard disk drives do. This means the drives have less parts that can break and SSD speeds are starting to catch up and pass even the fastest hard drives.

electric surge did something to the notebook. After several days of trying F10 and repair

we finally got to do the recovery and first try it errored second try seem to make it threw well did a scndsk and seem to stop on 4 of 5 parts stating on part 4 fixed somethinig after several hours I thought the system was frozen so shut it down. Now when we try to boot it ask for a password. We can do F2 and get in bios but they are set to supervisor and have no idea why or how that happen I did not set any password except when booting up the notebook to the desktop. Any ideas is there anything we can do to bypass the password or do we need to send this back to Acer? thank you for any assistants

I have open a thread for you Doreen acer aspire 4315 wont boot up

AFTER sticking its fingers in its ears and going la-la-la really loudly, HP has finally admitted that there are problems with the built-in Wi-fi on its 6000 and 9000 series Pavilion notebooks.

For a while the HP forum, here, has been all a-buzz with problems about the lappies' Wi-fis not working. The wireless card detected the network with all the efficiency of a blind person trying to find a black cat in a dark room that was not there.

However there had not been a dicky bird from HP until hacks at ZDNet wrote an attack on the outfit for ignoring its users.

Now it seems that someone from HP Total Care has logged on to say that HP has a BIOS update and some instructions on getting this resolved.

The spokesHP seemed to think that the problem only hurt those with AMD machines running Vista.

Readers of the forum also seemed to treat HP's advice with a large dose of mock. For a start the fault effected XP users and it was not a driver problem as fresh installs of the OS don’t resolve it. It appears it cannot be a Wi-fi card fault because those who replaced it found that it still does not work. Others who tried HP's new Bios update found it hopeless too.

In fact, the only cure that anyone has found that worked with 100 per cent certainty was to replace the motherboard or get a new computer.

MARKET RESEARCH FIRM iSuppli issued a report which demonstrated that a massive 82.6 per cent of PC notebooks are made in Shanghai.

The ODMs (original design manufacturers) dominating the market are largely Taiwanese firms, but they have steadily moved their production to mainland China over the last years.

And if you want a notebook that's got that little bit extra you'll be disappointed. Isuppli reckons that notebook PCs have become more standardised than ever.

This table furnished by iSuppli shows the dominance of the Taiwanese OEMs at a time when notebook sales are beginning to rocket. Out of the top 10 ODMs, the only non-Taiwanese player is Korean chaebol Samsung.

Principal analyst Jeffrey Wu at iSuppli said: "Production of mobile PCs is heavily concentrated among the top five ODMs, Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Asustek and Inventec." Those five accounted for 67.9 per cent of unit shipments in 2005, he added.

The firm said gross margins are down to only five to six per cent, and competition is furious.

That means that so called OEMs such as Dell and HP can play the ODMs off against each other and squeeze them to produce machines at a lower cost and a faster rate.

More details of iSuppli's report, Global OEM Manufacturing Analysis Q2, can be found here. µ

After many tries to find out what my lost password was on my acer computer with Vista, I tried this and it worked like a champ. And easy too. I am not a computer geek.  Just a good troubleshooter.

1. I downloaded Partedit32

2. started program and changed the pqservice partition type from 27 to 7

3. restarted computer, pressed F2 on startup, went into bios and disabled d2d recovery. Saved and started computer

4. for the next step I kept in mind that if windows started after this, acer somehow changes the type 7 back to 27, so I figured to not go into windows, when computer was restarting I pressed F8 a number of times and went into a windows recovery option.

5.  After a drill down of a couple of menus I found an option at this point to go out to dos.

6. after i was in dos, guess what, I had a drive letter x, in my case, so I figured this may be the hidden partition, so I did this at the x prompt

7. type dir

8. looked for aimdrs.dat file (i was told thats where the password is) found it

9. did this command  at the prompt:    copy aimdrs.dat c:

10. stated 1 file copied

11. exited out of cmd and rebooted my computer normal.

12. Then after booting I opened up notepad, went to file open, found aimdrs.dat on c drive and presto, opened the file and password, hint in the file.

summary 

Dont forget to go back to bios and enable d2d recovery. Also checked type for the pqservice partition with partedit32 and back to normal type 27

good luck.  Thanks for the great help on this site. I love it