Laptop Problem
 

Laptop froze, to reset it I closed it down by holding down power button. After closing down it now will not start, it just powers up as far as the detection of the DVD drive then a quick flash of the hard drive active light and power down before any activity on the screen
I have tried the usual remove battery wait for around an hour hold power button then power up on mains with battery pack still removed, result was still the same.
Removed the hard drive and put it into a usb caddy to remove docs/photo’s with no problems, so hard drive appears ok. Checked ram modules were seated and refitted hard drive still no boot up

Laptop is an Acer 5920 2 GB ram running vista home premium

Any suggestions what to try next

Try starting the laptop again, and as soon as it's started booting up, press and hold down the F8 button.
This should bring up the Windows advanced options menu, and using the arrow keys on the keyboard, highlight "safe mode" start up.

This will start your computer with the minimum drivers and running processes to get it going.
If this works and you've recently installed any new drivers or hardware, see if you can remove them then shut down the computer and try a restart without safe mode.

Sometimes doing a safe start followed by a shutdown and a normal start seems to clear the problem.

419

The laptop is switching off, before the boot sequence reaches a stage where you could get into selecting safe mode or even entering the Bios. It seems to detect the hard drive then power down.

If its firing up the DVD drive -
Have you tried booting from a Windows CD inserted in there ?

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d1.../Coconutty.jpg

Good News : Might just be your CMOS battey
Bad News: Might be board level failure

Basically, if you don't feel confident in your abilities to fiddle around and take proper ESD precautions, then just cart it off to an Acer authorised service centre.

If on the other hand, you want to have a go at replacing the battery, then Google is your friend because I'm not going to be responsible for reproducing some duff instructions. I'm not familiar with that unit.

Try Google for "Acer 5920 cmos replace".

Whatever caused it to freeze might also be the reason it will no longer boot - i.e. hardware failure. Perhaps mobo, perhaps CPU?

Any beeps audible?

SD

I fully charged the battery then disconnected the mains supply and removed the battery, held down the power button for around 90 seconds then replaced the battery and reconnected the mains power.
Then tried to boot the result was it just froze again, went through the procedure again and tried to enter the bios on the boot and the laptop froze on the bios page.
Tried booting from a copy of knoppix in the DVD drive with the same result. So it looks like the mobo or cpu has failed.
I will drop it into a repair shop for an estimate, if it is going to cost an arm and a leg I will do without a laptop until around October waiting for windows 7

SD
No beeps at all. At least I have recovered everything I want from the hard drive

Max

Is it the 5920 or the 5920G? i.e. does it have the Nvidia graphics chip in it?

Reason I ask is because of:
Nvidia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quick summary for those that don't know - looks like a whole bunch of the 8xxx and 9xxx series Nvidia graphics cards have 'problems' (probably due to a bad chip substrate). Laptops tend to be the first to fail due to their usage patterns with the power cycling.

Several manufacturers have been offering extended warranties to cover the problem, not sure if ACER is one of them.

Just an update
 

After reseating all connections etc that I could see and still not getting the laptop to boot, I put it on one side until I got a chance to drop it into a repair shop for an estimate.
Tonight I thought ok I will just try it before taking it in tomorrow, switched it on and it came up with a screen “windows failed to start “ do you want to run repair. Hit yes and left it to it, result is its now up and running.
It looks like it is a motherboard problem somewhere, either a bad connection or a crack. Otherwise why would it not even try to boot then suddenly burst into life, I wonder how long it will run for before failing again?
I have tried shutting it down a few times plus loaded it with a DVD conversion while surfing and it kept going. Strange things these computer gremlins

Max

Funny that, how something with a few billion working parts may seem complicated... at times.