ASUS gBook A1050 not booting - and how to fix it

My sister recently bought herself an ASUS gBook A1050. It’s a pretty low-powered netbook, with around 2GB of DDR RAM, running Android 2.2 (Froyo). After trying to install a number of applications on it - to no avail - I rebooted the machine and when it started, it simply hung at the ‘gBook’ startup screen. To fix the issue, here’s what I did;

Of course, we start with internet research - this post with similar symptoms wasn’t very helpful, but this one pointed me in the direction of upgrading the ROM.
Using an SD card, I downloaded the firmware update and extracted it to the root level of the SD card
Then I reset the gBook, and it booted OK from the SD card

The next challenge was the App Store - now Google Play.

I encountered more difficulty here - a search for ‘Dropbox’ in the App Store returned nothing - so I had to download the .apk for Dropbox and manually install.
I tried the same trick with the .apk for Google Play, but it keeps crashing on the gBook.

All in all a very negative experience with the gBook - unfortunately the first negative experience I’ve had with an ASUS :(

2 comments

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Andrew Folland · 29 March 2013

i recently had the same problem but the link to the firmware is now dead…..any idea of anywhere else i could get it?

KathyReid · 30 March 2013

Sorry Andrew I didn’t save the firmware. Maybe ASUS have it somewhere available?

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