Wierd Laptop Problem - Acer Aspire 135x

[OutToLunch]

Not come across this before - anyone shed any light?

Battery OK, PSU OK. Laptop recognises battery and charger, appropriate status lights on. Power up - no POST or beeps, nothing on the screen, nothing shows up if CRT is connected(fallen for that one before!). After about 2-3 seconds of spinning fans the laptop powers itself off again. Rinse, repeat. Add a few choice swear words.

Nothing seems to be dead - have the top off at the moment and the main fan + cpu fan both whir along when power is pressed, I thought it might have been a thermal cutout if the CPU fan had died but apparently not...

Doh.

[alan-d]

CMOS battery???

or BIOs chip gone on Hols?

[OutToLunch]

Hmm. Didn't think the CMOS battery was that crucial, but I'll check it. BIOS would be a bit of a s*d! One of those "It was working a minute ago, then I just turned it back on and..." jobs. Have a feeling some part of the story may be missing...

[Nij.UK]

it could be the motherboard that has gone...

it sounds like a very similar problem with some Tosh laptops, i use to be an engineer for tosh laptops and have done some work on acer laptops aswell... and it sounds like the motherboard could have gone...

is it still under warrenty?

Yeh if you have no POST beeps at all and just the fans going then it is prob a mother board fault.

Have you tried booting the machine with everything disconected? Battery / Memory / HDD / Mini PC cards etc? Do you get the same prob?

[ico2]

reset bios, not entirely sure how to do that on a laptop, I am guessing that the main battery is the only battery, so remove, leave for a while and then try again.

[crc-ict]

...I am guessing that the main battery is the only battery...

Not neccessarily - I've got a Sharp Actius notebook and that has a traditional CR2016 backup battery for the CMOS under a little screwed-down door on the bottom.

I had an Acer beforehand and didn't ever find a similar battery compartment, but that machine is now 6 years old, living a charmed life as a samba server and has never needed attention to a CMOS battery.

If absolutely nothing happens, my guess would be CPU or motherboard failure - you'd get some sort of error with basically everything else except a graphics card or LCD failure (where there would be no way of seeing an error), but it wouldn't power itself off in that instance.

Hope you find it!

Chris

[Ric_]

Sometimes the BIOS battery is soldered onto the mainboard... if you need to discharge that to reset the BIOS, you could try freezing it with freezer spray or by sticking it in the freezer over night (after suitably wrapping it in plastic).

I'm sure you could also try ringing Acer who will tell you to run the diagnostics and restore the factory defaults