I was mighty displeased with the spontaneous crashing of my Acer 8103 laptop after a few minutes of any intensive gaming. I had added a 1 Gb stick of Kingston ValueRam to the computer while keeping the factory-installed Hynix 512 mb stick of ram in the first slot.

Mixing these two brands of RAM does not work. If you experience random crashes during intense graphics & cpu usage (e.g. during games) and have mixed memory, it might be your problem. So be sure to buy memory in pairs or find Hynix to match the default stick – though I know nothing of Hynix’s quality.

Prior to removing my Hynix RAM, I tried Centrino Hardware Control (edit: software renamed to Laptop Hardware Control, available here) to set custom voltages for the CPU speed-stepping. That worked to a point, but I had to underclock my processor to make games just semi-stable. A bus multiplier of 14x resulting in less stability than 13x.

I then tried a better cooling solution. Note, you can keep the Acer laptop 2C-3C cooler if you prop it up off the table desk a few inches. Still crashed randomly.

Finally, I tried different versions of Acer’s bios (3C17, 3C22) and random rebooting still occured.

Right now I am stable, haven’t crashed for over a week, running with only my Kingston ValueRAM and bios 3C17.

keywords: Acer TM 8100 laptop, tm8100, 8103, spontaneous rebooting, random crashing, RAM matching, bios 3C17 3C22