night_shift

Hello and sorry for the long post,

Acer Aspire 1691WMLi on start LED’s light up, CD, HDD and FAN start up as normal then it just hangs at black screen. There are no error messages or BIOS beeps (new bios battery fitted). The notebook will sit from 10 to 20 mins before POST and then boot up as normal and operate ok. This will happen randomly from cold start, warm boot, with notebook warmed up or cold.

What I have tried – Plugged in another monitor (shows black screen also). Reseated RAM, HDD, wireless, screen, keyboard and touch pad connections and anything else that is connected. Most components have been tested on another notebook and work ok. The main board has been removed and checked for cracks, bad soldered joints and damaged components etc, especially under the CPU and ATI chipset. I have also tried another CPU and RAM modules. The bios was reflashed with the latest version, reformatted and reloaded Windows and original component drivers.

Power supply adapter supplies 19.5v ok to the main board (all the way from the connector plug through the connection socket and onto the main board). The battery is also ok. The screen inverter lights up the back light ok when external voltage is applied to dc input side.

What kind of pre POST fault is this? I’m at a complete loss for ideas, can anyone please help?

Acer Aspire 1691WMLi
Intel Pentium M730
ATI RADEON X700
80GB HDD
2GB DDR2 Dual Channel
XP SP3

Madcatz

First thing I'd try is to do a hard reset, take out battery and ac adapter, hold the power button for 30 seconds and then plug ac back in.

Also have you tried it only on ac power? or only battery power?

You said you reseated everything, but try it without everything plugged in, as in take out the cd drive and try it, same thing with the hard drive. look in SD card reader slot (if you have one) are any pins touching? anything in the slot?

night_shift

Good call Madcatz
I have already tried all the above long ago except as you mentioned, the only place I overlooked was the card reader....doh! I will have a look at the card reader and post back. Thanks

night_shift

Removed the main board again and checked the card reader slot and pcmci slot. Nothing in the slots and all solder connections ok. I also had another good look for damage and bad components......nothing???? Removed 5 off SMT electrolytic capacitors and checked them on my capacitor checker and no faults found. Sometimes capacitors can give power supply and voltage filter problems. Laptop put back together and still the same.

night_shift

The graphics chip, ATi mobility Radeon X700 has expired Towards the end the laptop would take longer and longer to start up.

The graphics chip would warm up and get very hot even with the Black screen. Further tests, inspections and component elimination leads me to believe that a 99.9% certainty it is the chip.

The laptop started getting random Black screen halts on start up months before the problem became terminal.

So now I have to finally say good bye to a hard working and loyal friend

night_shift

dai

did you try an external monitor on it

night_shift

Yea, mention that in the first post Dude.Thanks.
I have tried everything and some more.


My BIOS is Phoenix and the keys for entering special BIOS recovery mode on my ACER are Fn+Esc. As there are no beep codes on start up, I tried holding these keys at start up, and it returned 1 long beep and 2 short beeps. This series of beeps on my ACER tell me that it has a graphics fault.
If you have read my posts, I have carried out extensive investigations and now conclude 100% that my graphics chipset has failed. My chipset (ATI Mobility Radeon X700) is integrated into the system board. This means it is beyond economical repair.