Laptop broken: No screen, beeps from motherboard

delta36 · 11-04-2011 8:28pm #1

Hey all,
Ok, as the topic says, my laptop is broken, I'll post the full story below to give as much background as possible, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

Basically my laptop was working fine, I moved it from one room to another to transfer something to a harddrive, when I brought it back in and plugged everything back in, I noticed my plug in mouse wasn't responding, I figured I'd just leave it for a while as I didn't want to use my laptop for anything. I came back a few hours later, noticed mouse was unresponsive and that icons in the taskbar that usually moved were frozen. I figured my laptop was just frozen, so I held the power button and turned it off, then turned it back on.

The unit seems to power on fine, but laptop screen does not come on at all, no backlight, nothing at all on the screen, even by squinting at it, so I reckon it's not a backlight issue. However, after leaving the laptop on for about a minute, the laptop beeps. One long, low beep. This leads me to believe it's not just a screen issue.
The only other thing I can mention was that my laptop fan needed to be cleaned out, so the unit was quite hot. That said the fan has been blocked before and the unit has been hotter, but there was no trouble then..
I opened up the casing and checked the motherboard, as far as I can tell nothing has popped out of any of the ports. I should hopefully be able to hook the laptop up to an external screen later to see if it works, apart from that, I'm out of ideas!
The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100, with 2GB RAM and a 1.6Ghz AMD dual core processor.
I would really appreciate any help anyone could give me with this, the laptop is about 3 and a half years old, and I'd hoped it would last longer than this. I also can't find any inormation about what the beep might mean. Thanks again for reading and any help you can give me,

Mr. Presentable · 11-04-2011 8:30pm

Reseat the RAM

Mr. Presentable · 11-04-2011 8:33pm

Or maybe there's some buttons stuck on the keyboard......

delta36 · 12-04-2011 5:15pm

Thanks for the response, but reseating the RAM didn't work, and there are definitely no keys stuck on the keyboard. Any ideas people?

Kinetic^ · 12-04-2011 5:34pm

Sounds like video chip is gone.

massy086 · 12-04-2011 5:40pm

ye gpu would be my guess it may need a reflow or reball but try hook it up 2 a monitor and if your still not getting a picture its gpu problem

delta36 · 12-04-2011 5:47pm

Yeah, I tried hooking it up to a projector last night, and it didn't work. Is there anyway I can confirm it's the GPU or does the lack of output tell me all I need to know? Sod's law it had to be something irreplacable..

@massy I'm pretty good with computer terms, but what's a reflow / reball?

Thanks for all the answers so far, it's really appreciated!

Laptop broken: No screen, beeps from motherboard

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