Friday 27 February 2015

Acer BSOD 0x000000F4 after SSD Upgrade

BSOD 0x000000F4 picture

Today a colleague presented me with his Acer laptop and the BSOD pictured above. (0x000000F4)
It's a couple of years old (20011?) and was recently upgraded with a Crucial MX100 SSD and 8GB of Crucial RAM.

It had never exhibited this error prior to the memory or SSD upgrade, so I was less than amused by the situation, especially since the SSD was not accessible without powering off the machine, leaving me with no Dump File to check.

After much testing, it transpired that it would only crash when on battery power, and never in Safe Mode. This led me to look at the drivers which were loaded during a "normal" boot.
After a bit of trial and error, upgrading the Intel drivers etc, I uninstalled the Acer Power Management software. This has resolved the issue and the laptop will now transition between mains and battery power just fine.