frozen Acer Iconia a500

[K9CHP]

My tablet is frozen on the Acer screen. Tried pinhole reset, no luck, sometimes it went to the android screen, but no further. Did a full reset holding the volume up key, no joy. The tablet remained frozen on the robot screen. Any solutions would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[K9CHP]

Well, taking the time to download the app to my phone and read on a small screen, it seems to me that others have had the same problem. Seems to be a hardware failure. Out of warranty flat repair fee seems to be $200.00 plus shipping, both ways...
Is it worth investing that much in a device that is now obsolete, meaning it won't get updated etc. and prone to hardware failures?

OTOH, I have an iPod Touch second generation and it to cannot be updated, so it seems to me manufacturers are building in a very short life before obsolescence in those devices...

One thing is sure, Acer will not see my money. This is a common hardware failure and they should have recalled it long ago, or at least fixed it for free. I'll probably go the devil's way, meaning iPad, and use more cloud storage...

Now, if anybody has better info on how to get this problem fixed, chime in, by all means.

 

[Greg_E]

Is there any clue what part has failed? Just wondering if it is a component that can be soldered or replaced. I haven't researched the problem so I'm not sure what the possible causes might be. If the repair is $200, I think you can get an a200 for nearly the same price. There has been a 7 inch Lenovo on sale at Staples with 8GB and an SD slot, but no USB for $150 (a2107 or something like that).

If you decide to just throw your a500 away, please let me know, I'd like to open it up and take a look inside and see if there is a specific piece that might be a problem.

 

[K9CHP]

Sorry, the tablet has personal information and there is no way for me to delete it, or better overwrite it, so it won't be thrown away unless first having met a sledgehammer, in which case it will be pretty useless...

 

[jake1939]

My solution. Bite the bullet. I found a better place to spend $200 + than give it to Acer who has taken my money for this piece of crap and will not stand behind it. I would use it as a paper weight but I get pi**ed off every time I see it. I bought the Nexus 7 for $200 and could not be happier with a purchase. For those who prefer a 10 inch tablet get Nexus 10 for $399.

 

[JackUK]

Same thing happened to me. Only had the A500 for 15 months and it froze on Acer screen

Sent it back for repair at a cost of £55 for courier and diagnostic. Now they want another £247 for fitting a new mainboard.

No way am I spending that kind of money on a repair and no way will I purchase an Acer product in the future

 

[Sgooter]

My A500 froze earlier today, at which point I searched around the web and forums about this problem and discovered how widespread the problem has become. For me, the pin reset and factory reset steps were unsuccessful. Fortunately, on the Acer Support Community Forum / Tablet site, I found this solution [quoted below] offered by gauglerb (OP), which fixed my frozen A500:

"gauglerb wrote:
Well, I guess I was one of the lucky few to be suffering from this issue, but able to fix it. I downloaded the update.zip someone linked above. I placed it on a freshly formatted fat32 micro sd card. Placed it into the micro sd slot of the tablet.
I then help the volume button (closest to the power button) down for a second, then turned the power on, while still holding the volume button down. Released the power button once it vibrated. Released the volume button once I saw text on the screen. It automatically started the tablet update process, and then continued to setup afterwords and I had a working tablet again. I had previously already wiped my data, and reset my tablet and all that other stuff, but it wasn't until i ran the update, that it finally started up.
Best of luck to everyone. Still hate acer now for their total blind eye on the issue that is plaguing so many."

Sgooter replied with: "To my frozen friends: gauglerb's solution was successful for my A500, which froze up earlier today, so I recommend you give it a try. Note carefully the power up steps in gauglerb's post and follow them exactly; they are different than the standard factory reset steps. After downloading the update.zip file onto a blank micro SD card and inserting it into the A500, I tried the usual factory reset steps and nothing new happened...same frozen Acer logo. So, I powered down, then tried gauglerb's steps and it worked; followed by 5 minutes of nail-biting time while the Android robot did its thing with installing the 4.0.3 OS from the update.zip file. Now, I'm in the process of re-installing my old apps, many of which were backed up in My Apps in the Google Play store. I wish all of you success with this solution and many thanks to gauglerb and whoever else may have also created this fix for the frozen A500. "

The update.zip file (about 400mb for the 4.0.3 OS) was downloaded from 4shared.com. I suggest you navigate to the Acer community forum / tablet site and read thru some of the posts about this freeze-up problem, and you'll find the links to the download site and gauglerb's solution. In some cases, A500 owners are solving the problem by replacing the motherboard. In my fortunate case, it was simply by using the update.zip file. Good luck to you.