ACER laptop does NOT start-up :(

Well I took the plunge and disassembled the 2010 laptop, after all I had nothing to loose! I believe our problems could be due to poor quality control on the mother boards. My mother board seemed to have lots of fluff stuck on to it, as if the protected coating they put onto it, was put on, in not in a clean environment Few solder connections where also a bit iffy. This could be our problems, bad solder connections on the MoBo somewhere and they all lead to the same problem. My problems seem to be centered around the memory board connections. I was able to start the laptop normally by applying enough pressure on the memory connector 200 pins. Running the memory test , "Memtest-86 v 3.2" I was able to introduce errors by jiggling the memory board connector. I can virtually predict when it is going to fail.
I hope this helps.

ok but you fixed it by doing that or you still have tha same problem?
thanks

Unfortunately I don't have the equipment to re solder the 200 pin memory connectors. I can't identify which particular pins are faulty. By jamming a piece of thin cardboard between the memory board and the MoBo, which creates a slight pressure on the MoBo, I'm getting by. I know it's only a temporary fix and the problem could get worse. This works for me the majority of the time. In a one week period it only failed to start once and when it starts it keeps going with no problems. In the meantime I'm looking around for a used MoBo or a computer repair shop to tackle the solder job.

Hi, i have a travelmate 240.
The problem is the same.
all test are done without battery.

The pc boot itself after connecting power supply.
But the boot is not completed. Fan turn on,power led turn on, keyboard leds blinks but the lcd is black. no signal.

I disassembled laptop and and put mother board on the desk. now , when i push on the cpu the laptop boots currectly.
Fans start fast, keyboard leds blink, fan go slow, keyboard led blink again and then lcd is turned on.
Seems to be a second boot phase.
The laptop works good. after turning it off, the laptop boot fine pushing start button.

If i disconnect power supply from wall and then reconnect to wall, the problem is the same. laptop boot itself, with blank lcd.etc etc

Seem to be a bad solder on the motherboard that prevent the correct boot.

any help is good. let me know.

anyway the board is of bad quality process. not good hardware.replace the board is unuseful. the problem may appear again. better buy a new laptop i think.

hi

I appreciate all of the posts on this subject. I am glad it is not just me. My problem is different in that i do not get the fan or intermittement usage. I got nothing from the PSU and battery would work if charged it would appear but it is not charging. I wanted to share what I sent to tech support. If anyone has ideas, please let me know.

Thanks,
Joe


Hello, any help is greatly appreciated.

I usually run my laptop from the Power supply unit (PSU). The battery life has always been short but that was never a big deal. Today, even though I had the PSU plugged in the laptop was running off of battery. I checked the connection, but it drained the battery and went into hibernation mode. I tried the PSU from multiple outlets and the PSU has a green LCD when plugged into the outlet. However, attempts to power on the laptop with the battery removed gets me nothing. No partial boot or fan turning on, completely nothing. I PURCHASED a SEPERATE PSU and I get the SAME result. I do not get any LCD lights on the front of the laptop like I use to do when the PSU is plugged in. No LCD on laptop with either PSU.

When the battery is plugged in, the battery indicator light on the front will blink a couple of times when I try to turn the laptop on but no results. This is regardless of whether the laptop PSU is plugged in or not.

I really enjoy this laptop and I use it every day for work and business. It is very important to me to be up and running. Please advise and call me right away if you need to.

Thank you,
Joe

Hello,

To all that has been having the issue of Acer laptop computer not booting.
After reading all of your posts I have found out that most of them are all the same and came to a conclusion that the power supply, ram, hard drive, and video card is just fine. Through thinking of most computer if nothing happens and everything works just fine then it must be the mother board.

If you have a volt-a-meter then you can test the motherboard on if its getting power how ever not a recomond if you are wanting to void warentee. Last choice option. But from hearing everybodys statement that it is a motherboard issue..

If looking into getting another laptop I recomond eather of this options: HP,Compaq, Sony, Apple, or Dell <-- Not a good choice but they are better then Acer.

If have any questions please let me know.

I had similar problem with my Acer Aspire 3690

First I thought it was a problem with RAM, processor or even motherboard.

But, I found a solution and it was none of above causing the problem.

The problem was with small plastic thing that is pushed in when you close notebook.

In fact it was stuck, and always when I pressed power button only HDD led was flashing for a moment and fan started to work for few seconds, after that it stopped and there was nothing on the screen.

Now, I am really lucky that it was only that small plastic thing causing the problem.
Hope in your case is same problem. Otherwise you should be thinking about repairing a part of your notebook that could cause the problem.

Regards,
flo77is

zankfrappa wrote: This year it started to cause problems in not starting. If I'd used it for a day, it would take another day before it would start again, whether shut down or on standby - all this from the power supply. It's got worse, so time down takes longer before I can get any sign of life from the machine. The power light on the front shows juice.
The other day I disconnected the power cable for half an hour and pulled out the battery pack for 10 minutes. A couple of hours later it started up.

Thanx zankfrappa ! Simple but right idea!
My Acer TM2310 had a problem like that. It wont start standart way, no reaction pushing on off button. Light yellow battery charge led, after some time light in green. I try several tricks to fullish power system, no way. Then I disconnect the power cable and pulled out the battery pack for a half an hour. After I connect it all back notebook started up after pushing on off button.
I think there is a problem in Inactivity timeout memory. After some time out of maintence memory erasing all data.

My decission - to have Acer like a second computer, the main computer should be some more serious. It's not reliable.

Well as many of you have said already it is a motherboard problem.

My problem was along the same lines, with differences here and there. I took it to the acer tech center in Singapore (where I purchased my laptop, and I decided to wait till i got here since any repairs would be a lot cheaper here) and I got an answer back saying that I had a faulty motherboard and lcd..

I had this laptop just under two years and I had problems from the start, the main one being the fan burning out within 5months. I was told the repair would cost around 500-600 euros. Which is practically a new laptop so I told them to hand me back my faulty acer laptop.

So I have moved on to scrapping it for spare parts, not a great deal left but I'm turning my hard drive into a nice small portable external, RAM being put into a different laptop, and I'll probably sell the power supply, battery and fan on ebay for peanuts.

Not having much trust in anything now a days, I've purchased my Dell laptop with three year warrantee which will at least guarantee it will last me longer than the acer did.

Best of luck to the rest of you.. hope you have better luck than me.

Also, a faulty LAN could be a reason for not booting.
You could try pressing shortly on power on button few times rapidly, during that light on LAN will blink. After that normally press on power button and laptop should start, but the problem isn't solved.
If you don't fix LAN it may cause some other troubles, ex. mouse will stop responding.
I think that same could happen with any faulty device like PCI flash memory, PCMCIA slot, USB, etc.

I have fixed several Acer 280/290 series (5 pieces )very easily and happy to share it. the ones i have unplugged are still alive today.

Plug out the BIOS battery and leave it Unplugged!

voila.

enjoy , hope it works for you to

I live in Taiwan and bought an Acer Aspire 1690 about 1 1/2 years ago. It was a great computer for the price with a fantastic screen and I assumed that since Taiwan has a good reputation for LCDs and Laptops I would be okay with Acer.

However.. about a week after my year's warranty expired the combo drive stopped burning DVDs, then a few weeks later stopped reading anything at all. I tried cleaning it with no luck. Then the plastic drive face fell off and the clips broke.

Another month on and the keyboard started getting erratic. Then the fan started making a very loud noise with the laptop getting even hotter than usual (and this machine does get VERY hot anyway).

Now my laptop complains about resource conflicts with the WLAN card at boot up, combined with BSODs and other fun. I assumed this was a heat related problem but the issues are still here starting from cold so any damage has obviously already been done. I will speak to Acer but I assume I will be wasting my time.

At roughly US$1,000 this Acer was a good deal but with a year's good use plus a few months of semi-functionality it worked out to be a very expensive computer. I nearly bought a Sony Vaio but decided the Acer had more features for a better price, but next time I won't be tempted by anything less than a full 3 year warranty.

Hi all,

I also purchased Acer 1694 WMLi two years ago.

Unended list of problems, two times went with the tech support.

Now it deals with the same problem described at this thread. It does not power on, and power LEDs blink from ambar to green. The laptop does not charge the battery, it just tries to boot a soon as any power source is connected, but without succes. No bios screen , just the fan, and the HDD lighting constantly.

I do not know, if it could have been due to Linux, a conflicting PC-Game, cleaning the screen with alcohol, I am going mad about all this. I did not performed any bios upgrade, of course.

I will contact the support again, I hope there is a solution, and I can gather my data before I send again the laptop.

I didn´t believed that laptops were so sensitivy, until I bought mine.

Thanks for the information, hope that we find a solution.

Hi! I have a problem with my Acer computer too. It's a laptop and a few weeks ago the keyboard and the mouse stopped working correctly. Whenever I turn on the computer neither of them work; they don't cause any reaction on the screen. But if I remove the battery, plug the computer in and turn it on, they work perfectly. Is this a battery problem or do you think it's something worse? Thanks!

I have Acer Aspire 5570Z. Same problem cropped up out of the blue after 3 months of use since I purchased it. It will just freeze all of a sudden. Have to power it off using power button. On pressing power button again, the fan seems to turn on but neither the screen comes up nor it boots. (Tried connecting another monitor also.)

The dealer where I bought this told me to detach the battery and power adapter and re-insert the battery again. If I do these steps it does boot and functions normally for a while but ends up getting into above problem after a few minutes of usage.

The dealer says, it should be a problem with power supply and asked to talk to Acer technical support.

Got a strange answer from Acer. They told me to re-install touchpad drivers and try. I don't think that makes any sense.