Got a curly one for ya. My boys laptop shut down because the battery was flat. When he plugged in the charger and turned it back on you can hear the cooling fan running, the hard drive light comes on etc but nothing happens except the screen sort of flashes very faintly about once a second. When you hold the power button down for 5 seconds the machine shuts down. We plugged it in to charge it and I found a thing online that says to push a pin in a hole for 4 seconds to reset the battery but no change.
Laptop is an Acer E5-573G and is only about 18 months old.
Bugger. If it doesnt even POST it might have died and thats what caused the battery to go flat (big draw through the fault and no power management). Acer dont have the best rep You can always open it all up, clean the contacts etc. My 2012 win 10 laptop lost the ability to see the msata drive and wouldnt boot recently and I removed it and cleaned the contacts on the drive and re-assembled and its all good again. But the machine was still running the POST. For it not to do that the fault would need to be motherboard (likely, not much you can do), the gpu (maybe, but soldered on), cpu (unlikely) or ram (likely enough, in a socket and contacts cleanable). I'd def google how to access the ram and give the contacts a wipe with something and try again. Good luck!
Right now I have the back off with the battery unplugged/removed. I have seen comments online about static so I'm leaving it to sit for a bit before putting the battery back in and testing.
He was using the laptop, it gave the low battery warning to plug in the charger but by the time he found the charger and plugged it in it had shut down. This makes me think it's not a total failure (or so I'm hoping anyway).
Yes, we've gone off Acer too. Got my other boy an ASUS machine and it seems much better?
Yes you can power it up in pieces so long as you havnt removed any heat sinks, unplugged any fans and nothing is in a position to cause an electrical short.
Powered it up without battery. no change.
Powered it up with battery .no change.
The machine powers up, cooling fan comes on but the hard drive does not spin up. the screen flashes once every second but it's very dim, you almost can't see it.
You can always open it all up, clean the contacts etc. My 2012 win 10 laptop lost the ability to see the msata drive and wouldnt boot recently and I removed it and cleaned the contacts on the drive and re-assembled and its all good again. But the machine was still running the POST. For it not to do that the fault would need to be motherboard (likely, not much you can do), the gpu (maybe, but soldered on), cpu (unlikely) or ram (likely enough, in a socket and contacts cleanable). I'd def google how to access the ram and give the contacts a wipe with something and try again. Good luck!