Be Excellent To Each Other

I've heard a lot of bad things about Acer, but my laptop has been very good and made me wonder what the fuss was about.
Today I found out, because I dared to turn it off and now it won't come back on.
Battery, power supply, or both, the fan comes on, then dies for a bit, then comes on again, and just sits at a black screen forever (no sign of getting to the bios).
Any suggestions, apart from becoming a member of the acer are shit club?

Acer.

Cheap.

Over specced for the price (usually better than other laptops).

Not very reliable.

Flimsy.

It's kinda like Advent. They base their computers around a pretty decent CPU but skimp on what matters.

In fairness to it, it's my main pc at the moment and I've been running it like it was a server.

Ah ok fair enough. Yeah they're just not built for it tbh.

After digging out my old laptop, it seems that a quick burst of activity from the fans and then nothing is normal, it just doesn't get to the bios.

This is going to be a long day.

I'm very fond of Acer laptops Have had two which get absolutely hammered by my kids (I have mentioned the one that run for two years on miracles and wishes after a bar of chocolate was left on the keyboard)

I'm fairly confident that what you have there is a dead battery (if the green light is on on your charger/power suppy), I keep my laptops plugged in which ruins the batteries so they can't hold charge and that's exactly what happens after 20 mins if the power supply gets knocked out.
Have you checked e-bay for spares?

Surely if the battery was dead it would still power up when plugged in to mains (particularly if the dead battery was removed). At the moment it's showing exactly the same signs of life (or lack of) regardless of how it's powered. Although I'd love for someone to reassure me otherwise, if it's got power, but doesn't get as far as the bios, then the first thing to look aat is the motherboard.

Oh, if anyone can find me a service manual for an acer extensa 5630ez, it would be much appreciated. I'm sure I've got one already, but it's probably on the dead laptop

From the sound of it it could be a few things.

Dead GPU. This is frequent in laptops. How they thought a 2" or smaller fan can cool something I don't know.

Dead power stage on the board. Common with Acers.

Bad PSU.

Loose/broken/solder cracked power socket. Again, common problem on laptops and one that no fucker seems to be trying to address.

However from the sound of it it seems like you didn't cart it around much which means in theory the power socket should be fine. However, to test it put in the plug and give it a gentle wiggle. If there's any movement or it seems to work when you move it a certain way you will have your answer. Replacement part is a couple of quid, fitting it, however, is a real fanny batter.

Edit. Hmm looking at the GPU it's totally feeble so in theory shouldn't be a hot one. Some of these acers carry semi decent Radeons...

It's nothing special graphics-wise, but I'm not ruling out some kind of overheating (I took the fan off and cleared a huge load of junk from the air vents, I should really clean moremore often).
I can't see why an issue with the power socket would affect it running on a battery as well. If this was a desktop, I'd probably be popping out for a new motherboard, but it's easier said than done with a laptop.

Well I found a service manual, but I'm none the wiser as to what's gone wrong.
I may operate further tomorrow, but I can't find any replacement boards anyway, so it'll be a case of take it apart and put it back together again.

Give it a good clean etc..

Put it in an oven (kidding)

I'll take it to bits tomorrow and see if there's any sign of life. Might be time to find some space for my desktop.

Nice knowing you Joans!

My G4 is dead, it only does anything when you push the power button and then it dies a few seconds later. Power supply, has to be.

When my iBook started to randomly power off, broken tracks on the motherboard were to blame. Some taped coins in a strategic spot keep the broken bits held together, and it's lasted well over a year that way.

Just things to consider.

Still no further developments, but I haven't actually taken it to bits yet as I'm not convinced it'll do anything other than waste my time. Attempts at using the emergency bios recovery have been unsuccessful, and I don't have too many other ideas.
I'll see if I can get hold of another power supply, but if that was the problem I'd have expected it to still boot when on battery power (unless the battery was already knackered and I didn't realize).

My old laptop is being prepped as I type, guess I'll have to get used to xp again.

Oh, I didn't bother to mention this because I didn't think it could be related although my trawling through google yesterday brought up a few similar issues (but no apparent solutions).
I rebooted because windows update told me to. Now normally I'd look ththrough all the updates, but I've left it for so long there were loads of them, so I lazily hit install all important updates and let it do its thing. Then it turned off and never came back on. Now I'm way more on the side of coincidence, rather than microsoft killed my laptop, but I just thought I'd mention it as it doesn't seem to be the first time.

Vague offer of laptop diagnosis. If you're not in a hurry.

Have you tried baking it for a few hours? Apparently this fixes most broken electronics.

If you're in a hurry use the microwave.

It's not going anywhere so if you have any ideas then they'd be much appreciated.
Here's what I can tell you:
It's an acer extensa 5630ez, about 18 months old
It came with Vista and has been running windows 7 for about a year.
It's my main pc here, so I treat it more like a desktop (at a rough guess it's been running constantly for about a month), I did recently wonder if that might be a bad thing, but it's shown no signs of any problems.
I got a windows update prompt yesterday morning and decided it could probably do with a reboot, I just told it to install the important updates.
It finished and nagged me to reboot for a bit while I was saving everything, when I did let it reboot, I had to force close as "something" was still running (nothing was in the list though).
It went through part of the update installation, but after a while everything was black (I don't remember how long a while was).
I powered off, then back on and nothing happens, no post screen comes up.

To be clear, the power light comes on and stays on, the dvd drive makes a noise, the hard drive activity light comes on for about a second, as does the fan. If the battery is in, the charging light is on, and and there is a beep from the speaker when I insert or remove the power cable.
Currently there is a few seconds worth of activity from the fan every few minutes, but neither drive is connected so I don't know if they would be doing anything.
Also, the usb stick that is plugged in is lit up indicating there is usb power (it's not flashing though), if I reboot, this light remains off (apart from a flicker at power on) unless I switch to a different charger, then it will remain lit for the first power on only.

I have tried the following:
powering on with just battery, just power supply and both.
Removing the easily accessible components (hard drive, dvd drive, ram, wireless card)
clearing the bios by removing battery and pay and holding the power button for 30 seconds (the Internet is a bit vague on this with some people suggesting 60 seconds)
connecting to a second monitor to see if it displayed anything (it didn't)
creating an emergency bios recovery disk (well, flash drive) and trying to trigger it by holding fn+escesc when powering on (this is supposed to make the power light flash, but I'm having no luck. I did have the power light flashing at me yesterday, but I don't think I did anything special and I didn't know what it meant at the time.

If it was a desktop I'd have probably gone motherboard shopping by now.

Sorry if that's terrible to try and read, but it was a real bitch to type on my phone.
Any ideas will be very welcome.

I would test the PSU. If it's outputting correctly go on fleabay and look for a board.

You'd be amazed how many people have picked the laptop up by the screen and broken it. My mate did it not once but twice (with Acers) and stripped them and sold the parts.

I have tried two PSUs (although admittedly the second was from an Acer netbook, so I'm not sure if it would power a laptop anyway), and both had the same outcome.
I've tried looking for boards, but I can't find any, plenty of spare screens though.

It could be one of the low-volt rails on the motherboard or the CPU itself, but it does sound like something to do with the BIOS. I would persevere with that for a while, try clearing it and emergency booting it or whatever you did a couple more times.

A quick google suggests it's fiddly to get the recovery boot from USB to work, it needs some luck to get a USB stick that'll work:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/32 ... -dead.html

Thanks, that seems a bit better than the files I've found. I'm not convinced that a bootable usb stick is required, because if the bios isn't working, it's not going to be booting anything, but that could be the key difference between what I was doing before and what I've got here. Will report back soon (after going on a usb stick scavenge).

Yep, but it sounds like there's a 'hardware level' bootstrap loader which you can use to fix a knackered BIOS. And it's quite understandable that it won't support every USB stick and filesystem format under the sun...
I one wrote such a loader which only worked with a freshly formatted FAT 8 PCMCIA card (embarrassed look)

Good luck!

I've tried a 1 GB stick (which seems to be the smallest I can get my hands on) and no luck so far.
This is startig to remind me of a similar situation I had with a desktop, I turned the monitor on (after the pc had been on for a while) and it had locked up, pressed reset and just got a black screen, same as my laptop.
I was convinced it was the bios and attempted hot swapping with another machine to try and flash a new image. I think I even bought a pre-flashed bios chip, still no luck. In the end I just bought a replacement motherboard and that fixed it.

Reading through that thread a bit further I see that someone could only get it to work after removing the hard drive. I'll get the screwdriver back out again then...

Still no luck, looks like it's a lottery of usb sticks, or a usb floppy drive will work (if anything).

If all else fails (and I'm serious, BTW) put the cunt in the oven. I'm just rebaking my 8800 ultra after it broke down again (was my fault) so I'll take some photos etc.

Got to be a BGA fault (GPU or the CPU socket). And the fact that you see monitors for sale as spare gives me a rough idea that your board is notorious for breaking down.

Mmm yummy cookies !

This is not a thread to show off your working laptop

That's not my working laptop that is my now perfectly functioning Geforce 8800 Ultra that died a couple of weeks back.

When I got it it worked for about a day then when Windows tried to load drivers it would black screen. I stripped it, put it in the oven and put it back together, perfectly working for about 7 months.

Then one day I noticed one of the screws had popped out and when I went to redo it a part of the heatsink broke off so I tried to put in a self tapper. I thought it was going in but what was happening was the board was bowing. I heard a nasty creaking sound and realised Id fucked it. Put it in the PC, dead. Totally fucking dodo.

Took it apart earlier, resoldered a resistor back on, stripped the entire thing down and cleaned it.



Then put weights on the parts that could have been fouling contact with the solder.



Into the fan asst oven, 220c ten mins.



Out of the oven, let it cool before you remove the weights. Repad, repaste.



And what you get is the above. Three runs in Kombustor which thrashes the absolute cunt out of your card.

Now. Why am I mentioning this? It's what you said dude. Something about how you had not turned it off for ages but when you did it wouldnt reboot? Well, I have a feeling that when you turned it off it cooled down and changed shape and has done what graphics cards do. Fucked a solder connection.

As I said, if nothing else is working then rip the board out, TIM clean it after removing everything (sinks, fans ETC) and put some weight on the things that are likely to have fucked. GPU chip, CPU array, RAMDAC, memory ETC. Then bake it.

Working laptop you say...



The second hand £100 off ebay acer laptop. 4 years with an autistic kid using it at least 6 hours a day and it's still going, ok it rattles constantly, the dvd drive does not work, you have to cancel disk check when you turn it on, the keyboard is fucked, it does not like flash and there is this really weird smell when it's been on for a while but it Just Won't Die.

Note: got him a separate keyboard for the new laptop so hoping this one will end up less manky. Edit: btw that stuff covering most of it is chocolate

So essentially I've got the laptop equivalent of the RROD? I'll get some towels.
Stripping the entire thing down to the board isn't something I'm too keen on doing if I think there's any possible sort of solution where I wouldn't have to do that.

Further developments, whatever these might mean.
The hard drive is ok, I've put it in an enclosure and hooked it up to my other laptop.
If I remove the CPU (and the cooling pipe that sits on top of it and some other chip), then it just switches off after a few seconds, still no sign of any error beeps.
Replacement boards appear to only exist in other countries, and cost almost as much as a replacement laptop would.

The problem Joans (in my humble opinion) is this ROHS tin solder shit. It's brittle and the ammount of laptops and GPUs that fail since it was introduced is alarming.

Recently a friend of mine in the USA bought an open item X58 motherboard and it refused to post. No beep, nothing. Error code said memory (has LED diag segs). Turned out that one pin on the CPU socket was slightly bent. Put it back? perfect.

If one pin of your CPU socket has a bad solder joint then it could be your answer. Personally I reakon it's the GPU area. Either way a bake as a last resort is well worth the effort IMO.

Check your contents insurance for accidental damage (and the excess) and then try not to fall down the stairs while you're holding the laptop?

When my laptop broke (a Dell, that just wouldn't switch on at all) I sent it away and they replaced the motherboard. Lucky it was still in warranty, but as it was only 5 or 6 months old at the time I'm a little concerned for its longevity post warranty period.

Not really looked at this much over the last couple of days, but I have noticed something. If I plug a usb stick in to it and turn it on, then the stick lights up like it's ready to be used (but no flashes, so it's not being accessed), but if I hold down fn+esc (which is supposed to take me to the bios recovery), then it does a quick flash at power on, but then nothing at all.
I'm sure this means something, but I have absolutely no idea what.

After numerous attempts at using usb sticks and cds, I've not got anywhere. I now have a board in my hands and a lot of screws. I've tried it when it's just power and screen, but still no difference.
Shall I preheat the oven.

Christ joans, don't do it!

It's that or a hammer at the moment, although if I get it working I bet I can't get it all back together.

The oven will only (and then only in theory) solve broken connection problems, and these will show up right now as intermittent, i.e. it should work or do something different if you flex the board slightly or press down on the larger chips etc while switching it on.

Apart from that it'll only serve to waste time at best or fuck it up properly - typically when the devices on the underside of the board fall off.

Well, I've put it back together, and there's a slight "improvement" in that it automatically powers on when I plug it in (the power button does work to turn it back off though). At least this increases my testing efficiency slightly.

Time to see how much I can sell it for spares I guess.