[Esprimo V5545]

[ssimlai]

Hi

Thanks for letting me into the forum. I bought the machine in early Feb and then registered immediately. Don't know why it took two months to let me in though. Is it the same with Fujitsu service?

Never did I imagine I would have such problems with the machine the day I decided to buy it. I had actually gone to the shop to buy either a Dell or HP or Asus and while the budget was quite right, I wasn't getting all features. And then, living in Singapore I always have a feeling that European manufactured products (Fujitsu) will be far better than Chinese made ones (Dell, HP, Asus, etc.). So the first reason to choose the machine was this.

The problems started within about 2 days.

1) Heat. The side of the machine is too hot. I have another laptop, the one an HP Compaq nc4200 from my company and before this I have used two other laptops, one a Toshiba for 4 years (too good I must say) and the other an Acer (third rate product - caught fire due to power supply short circuit in two weeks), but never did I face a heat issue. I called the service team and then said I need to leave the machine with them to compare with another one to see how hot it really is. By then I already had a lot of stuff on the HDD and didn't want to give it away for overnight. Any idea if there could be any third party software that would let me decide if the temperature is really high or is okay for this kind of product?

2) Display: Suddenly, the screen would go dim and lots of colours all over. This would happen any time...don't specifically remember the conditions. I updated the graphics from a link sent by support and the frequency of occurence is much lower now, though not zero.

3) Keyboard: Left SHIFT LOCK key: No one could tell me what it is for. All normal keyboards have two SHIFT keys but this one has a left SHIFT LOCK and a right SHIFT.

4) Keyboard: Usage of CTRL+SHIFT: Try doing it to select not a full sentence and not a few letters in a word but three or four words in a sentence. You can't. It stops after the first word. Support told me in early March that it is a BIOS issue to be resolved with the next BIOS update.

5) BIOS Upgrade: And this time I got really pissed. I checked last night to find a new BIOS posted. Very happy that my work would be smoother with CTRL+SHIFT. Hell no. I downloaded the file and installed exactly as instructed. The computer froze but I thought these things take time, so I left it...for A FEW HOURS...it still remained frozen. I had to remove the battery and then the ac mains to switch off the machine which had heated up like hell. I restarted the machine...luckily it was working all right as before. But what happened to the BIOS? The website has the audacity to show the status as a bright green tick-mark.

Any help?

[pancheros]

When you said:

2) Display: Suddenly, the screen would go dim and lots of colours all over. This would happen any time...don't specifically remember the conditions. I updated the graphics from a link sent by support and the frequency of occurence is much lower now, though not zero.

did you have in mind something like this:



Because I had that problem, and the upper outer side of the screen (near the release-to-open arm) was very warm.
I've solved the problem with motherboard replacement (FSC collect&return service), and the described area haven't been that warm since.

Bottom line, it's hardware malfunction, report the problem to helpdesk...

PS. Other problems you've mentioned:
Left SHIFT LOCK key - I have regular left (and right) shift and caps lock above the left one
Usage of CTRL+SHIFT - yes, the same problem
BIOS Upgrade - haven't tried yet

[jazzyb88]

My BIOS update also crashed while trying to do it under Windows. Try using the CD ISO version to perform the flash under DOS.

[colmcd]

Yes same error as on about 5 laptops that our company has currently purchased.

[DeAce]

Post by ssimlai on Fri Apr 11, 2008 16:49

...4) Keyboard: Usage of CTRL+SHIFT: Try doing it to select not a full sentence and not a few letters in a word but three or four words in a sentence. You can't. It stops after the first word. Support told me in early March that it is a BIOS issue to be resolved with the next BIOS update.

5) BIOS Upgrade: And this time I got really pissed. I checked last night to find a new BIOS posted. Very happy that my work would be smoother with CTRL+SHIFT. Hell no. I downloaded the file and installed exactly as instructed. The computer froze but I thought these things take time, so I left it...for A FEW HOURS...it still remained frozen. I had to remove the battery and then the ac mains to switch off the machine which had heated up like hell. I restarted the machine...luckily it was working all right as before. But what happened to the BIOS? The website has the audacity to show the status as a bright green tick-mark.

I also experienced the Ctrl+Shift issue on my Esprimo v5545. After running the BIOS update in Windows (which also froze for me) the issue is no longer occurring.
On boot-up I launched the BIOS and found the version had been upgraded to the desired version - R01-A1A.

My suggestion would be to check your version of the BIOS to see whether it did actually update. Then follow jazzyb88's advise and attempt to run the update from DOS.

I'm afraid I have not experienced any of your other issues and am unable to advise any further.

[pecko88]

Nevr, I mean never flash your bios from within windows, couse there are a lot of programs and services that might interfire with the flashing process.
Some antivirus programs might couse a flashing process to go wrong, couse they might asume it is a virus activity and does brick the board.