Another dead laptop!

[ASC1951]

This one is an Acer Aspire 1640z - i.e not exactly a top of the line piece of kit, but it worked perfectly yesterday.

Diagnosis - completely black screen, but it isn't lifeless because the power-on light and battery indicator work and there is the usual whirring. Having it on AC makes no difference and the battery is fully charged. I don't think it is a dead screen connection (or at least not just that) because if I try to access it via a laplink from the PC it is reported as not functioning, and when I plug the laser mouse into any of its 3 USB ports the mouse lights up for a couple of seconds then dies. It is - or was - running XP and there is a BIOS password, if those make any difference.

I have seen suggestions that this might be a Bios fault and I can get it going by running an updated driver from a USB stick, but I am a little reluctant to monkey about with stuff that is a bit beyond what I understand.

It is probably worth less than the cost of getting it repaired these days and everything on it is backed up, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if it failed to survive surgery. I just sense that it might be quite simple to fix. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Norm]

If you can access it from a PC, do you have a monitor which you could plug straight into the laptop? That should determine whether or not the screen is the issue.

 

[ASC1951]

I hadn't tried that, Norm.

But now I have, and it didn't work with the PC screen. The only difference is that the mouse stays live, which is odd.

 

[ian turner]

RAM failure perhaps.
Or Cmos battery dead if it's 5 years old or so. Hmm review from 2007 so maybe not.
Try removing the laptop battery altogether because if that has died it may affect the laptop running
on mains.
The whirring noise will be the fan and the power to the USb tends to independant of the motherboard

 

[Globalti]

Sorry to depress you but the same has just happened to my son's Acer Aspire. Luckily it was still in warranty (by 3 days!) so we sent it back to Acer (very efficient collection service) and it came back a week later with new hard drive and motherboard.

 

[Ticktockmy]

Sometimes during the boot up they lose the Video drivers, have you tried holding down F8 during bootup, then trying starting in safe mode, if it then starts up the screen in Low Res, then it just drivers that are missing, then go into device manager, and ask it to reinstall the drivers. Sounds simple but it a bloody nightmare..

 

[Norm]

If I have read correctly, the screen isn't showing anything, not even the BIOS. If that's true, it's not going to be video drivers.

 

[Cardiac]

I have known other Acer laptops get their BIOS screwed. Note - this is not the BIOS settings, but some of the BIOS program memory itself. Some Acers have a BIOS recovery mechanism, and in my case (for an Aspire One) it worked. I was able to recover by preparing a USB stick with the necessary files and then switching on with some specific buttons pressed. There may be similar trick for your PC, but I don't have that model.

Try Googling Acer Aspire 1640z bios rescue - it seems to point to various methods. If you are not too PC savvy, try to find someone who is to help you. This is dangerous territory, and there is certainly the potential to make things worse rather than better.

Good luck.

Les.

 

[ASC1951]

If I have read correctly, the screen isn't showing anything, not even the BIOS.

Nothing at all. Brightening the screen has no effect, either.

If that's true, it's not going to be video drivers.

I do get a beep error - one long and two short. I haven't been able to find what the BIOS is, but the only one with that beep code is a version of Award Bios, where 1L+2S is a video adaptor problem. In that case the next step would be to open it up, see if I can find the video card, give it a jiggle, and be prepared to throw the whole thing away.

I'm not entirely comfortable with that diagnosis. I can't get the laptop connected from my PC, which suggests to me - not knowing a lot about these things - that there is a boot problem somewhere upstream of accessing the video adaptor. There again, I have a boot and HDD password, so maybe I should try to put those into my blank screen and then try accessing it from the PC....

I found myself eyeing up an ASUS 1018 in Currys today, so the Acer's days may be numbered.

 

[ian turner]

Interesting as according to the spec its an intel 915gm integrated chipset so would imply a motherboard fault.
If you have two sticks of ram installed then install one at a time on the off chance that the graphics memory is mapped to a partly damaged stick.
If you're getting a bios warning then that is upstream of everything as it's not booting at all as it has not got past the bios startup. You cannot communicate with a PC until it gets past the point at which the bios attempts to boot from one of the specified boot drives

 

[Cheule]

Brightening the screen won't have any effect if the backlight has died.