Aspire 5100 possible Black Screen of Death help needed

zzdeath

I need some outside expertise involving a possible Black Screen Of Death on an Aspire 5100, or thoughts on whether it actually my graphics card dying.

I was browsing the internet and then a bunch of lines appeared on the screen, and it went black and would not respond to anything. A few days later it booted normally, but after a week or so, it happened again and won't work. It turns on, but nothing appears on screen, the power light shows and the CPU fan spins, even the disk drive tries to start, but it doesn't boot up.

I've was using it on an external monitor, but nothing appears on the external, nor on the built-in screen when I unplug the monitor.

 

I've tried reseating the RAM and even changing (because I recently just swapped out my old chips for new ones from Acer from the lawsuit), I've tried resetting it by removing the battery and such, and I've tried booting a my Windows 7 install disk: nothing works.

I've been trying to boot DOS from a USB drive, with the Acer BIOS but it has not been working (I'm not sure I'm doing it right though, the BIOS files come with a .bat, .rom, and 2 .exes. I believe .bat is the correct file?)

Any insight into this problem will help greatly! Thank you in advance.

philetus

What exactly does it do when you boot from Windows disk?

zzdeath

Nothing appears on the screen but, the drive spins, then stop and continues like that. It's always a black screen, no matter what I do, including a boot disk (or what I've been trying, a USB stick).

IronFly

Since you already tried to connect an external monitor and still had no signal, i think the GPU is not working.