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Well it's doing it again this morning

Now that it is daylight hours you can see the screen starts pulsing once per second almost immediately on boot up.

Found the paper work and we've only had the damn thing for about 15 months.

Take it back. Australian consumer law "Fit For Purpose" exceeds any warranty period. You'll get it fixed or a new one.

Yeah it's looking like that will be the only solution. I will test it with my old HD first. about an hour ago my boy got up and turned it on. It sort of booted. It got the the ACER screen, then it came up with a Windows message saying Windows had encountered an error but before we could take a picture off it it reverted back to the black pulsing screen.

immortality wrote:Yeah it's looking like that will be the only solution. I will test it with my old HD first. about an hour ago my boy got up and turned it on. It sort of booted. It got the the ACER screen, then it came up with a Windows message saying Windows had encountered an error but before we could take a picture off it it reverted back to the black pulsing screen.

If you get the Acer screen then the motherboard is working (at that point in time). If you get a Windows message saying Windows has encountered a problem then your system is operating from the hard drive and then failing. Get a Live CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html) and check to see if it will boot from a Live CD or Live USB, you may need to change boot order, thereby bypassing the hard drive and Windows. If it boots runs some tests. If you open the machine up, which it seems you already have, you may not be entitled to any replacement as the manufacturer will probably claim the system broke because of tampering.

If you have made a windows repair disc which I think is the same as MAGP is talking about then yea reset the bios boot sequence and see what happens. Probably like most preloaded machines you don't get the original windows disc.

The download I linked to above is a full OS on a CD with tools to use to diagnose hardware problems. A Windows Repair Disc (WRD) is just a disc to repair Windows and reinstall it if need be. You can't use, as far as I am aware, a WRD as a live system.

If its a bad solder joint on the motherboard though you might do more damage to the contents of the HDD. This doesnt sound like a windows problem, I dont think i'd go the windows fix route until the hardware is stable.

Acer use to have a setup were the bios would use the main battery to extend the bios battery life and wouldn't come up till a certain voltage is meet on the main battery. As the laptop is less than 2 years old the bios battery should be fine and it doesn't explain the pulsing of the screen, unless some bios setting is causing issues but Ill stuffed if I can think of any that could......I think the video chip reflow soldering has gone off happens due to excess heat and age....google "laptop oven tick" if your game done it a few times and it does work...sometimes

I too think it's a hardware fault and possibly the gpu. Now when you boot it up nothing happens on the screen.

That oven trick looks interesting but I don't think I'm game to test it. This acer doesn't have a separate graphics card instead it's all on the motherboard

To me the acer laptops do seem to run very hot, I bought my other boy an ASUS one with similar specs and it barely gets warm in comparison.

deffo hardware. not WinOS.
sounds heat related TBH. ie: runs for a bit then toasts. any heatsinks that are loose/dried out thermal paste on core components or fans that arent spinnning (fans)
my old 17" MBP runs hot, depending on load, it sees 80 degrees - somuchso now i have a fan program to OD the fans to help cool it down. when the fans are going it comes back to under 50.
i'm not a fan of acer. my current employ used to buy them as standard machines. not any more, now they have lenoblo which are just as shit.