Fix ACER Iconia W4 820 not starting after sleep

I often use ACER Iconia W4 820 tablet to watch series in bed. I have it placed on a tablet stand so even when I fall a sleep in don’t break it. It’s great, when video stops playing, it goes into sleep automatically after a bit of time and that’s that.

Problem is, when I want to turn it on again in the morning, it’s just dead. Not even power on LED responds. First I thought battery was flat, but it still had around 50% charge after I managed to force wake it up…

I could wake it up using recessed RESET button to get it running or by holding POWER button for 10 seconds, releasing it and then pressing it again once. But that’s actually reset and that sucks.

After some digging, issue seems to be related to Broadcom’s wireless module “Broadcom 802.11abgn Wireless SDIO Adapter”. Fix was promised by ACER, but they of course never delivered it…

Apparently, in many cases, installing newer wireless driver helps. I managed to dig the latest driver from May 2015, provided by TOSHIBA. From the looks of it, it fixed the issue for me. It might happen again, but so far so good. It might also work with other devices that are experiencing the same wake from sleep problem and are using the same wireless module.

Download:

Broadcom Wireless Driver for Windows 10

 

Failed Win8.1 tablet power management

Got my ACER Iconia W4 tablet few days ago and I’m loving it. It’s amazing how a slim 7 inch tablet can run anything I can run on my laptop or desktop. It’s a proper full fledged Windows 8.1 system. However, like always I already have to rant about it. Not about ACER, but more about Microsoft and their idiotic decision to link screen sleep mode with actual sleep mode. What does this mean? It means that if you want to run for example uTorrent or net radio in browser while having your screen turned off to save power, you simply can’t. If you press the button to turn the screen off, tablet goes into sleep and music stops playing. But if you don’t, screen will suck a lot of power even though you don’t need it at all. And this is frankly just straight idiotic.

Question here is, why the hell Microsoft linked both features!? Why not give users ability to control power like we can on a desktop or laptop? We have a Start button and Power button on a tablet, why can’t we have more control with those two? How hard would it be to add a button “Turn off display” on a “Metro” Start menu? or next to a shutdown/sleep button. Or something…

Waiting for Windows 8.2 or Windows 8.1 Update 2…