[VulgarDisplay88]

My sister has given me her Acer laptop to look at. She said that it was working fine when it randomly shut down. On reboot it worked fine but a few minutes later it shut down. Now it powers on, can hear the HDD fire up and the light comes on but the screen just stays black. It powers itself off after about 5 seconds and then on again and stays powered on but still has a black screen. It doesn't have any sound coming from it, no beeps etc.

What I've tried:

Cleaned out the fan and heat sink with compressed air.
Re-applied thermal paste.
Double checked all cables/ribbons.
Removed 1 stick of RAM.
Removed both sticks of RAM.
Removed HDD.
Removed battery and tried booting with power cable in.
Removed battery and power cable and held power button for 60 seconds.
Removed CMOS battery for 15 minutes and installed again.
Installed RAM and SSD from my laptop.

None of the above have made a difference.

I can't see if works with an external display because it only has VGA and I don't have an adapter.

I have installed her RAM and HDD in my laptop and everything works fine so I guess it's not the HDD or RAM.

Any other ideas?

Thanks.

 

[sweenytodd]

Try it with a monitor. This is usually the case when no display laptops.

If it's still not working then the last resort is to reflow the gpu.

 

[WindowsTech]

That's the very common (just Google) Acer Black Screen of Death (that's why you don't buy and Acer). Try to flash the BIOS. Download the latest bios and put it on a USB flash drive that is fat32, plug in drive and hit power then hold FN & ESC or ALT & ESC keys for 5 seconds and hope it flashes and you get your screen back. But it could be the GPU also. I have a client now with a Aspire V5 and it has the black screen intermittently so I flashed the bios to the 2nd latest yesterday so we will see how that goes. If not fixed I'll flash it with the latest bios. I tell everyone not to buy ACER