Help please ! Acer Aspire 5738G booting up but no display

Brainfog

Hi. As stated my Acer aspire 5738G appears to boot up fine, can hear it start up as normal but there is no display or "beeps" on startup. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

billsey

'I can't remember, does that model have a key combination that switches from internal to external monitor? You could give it a try to see if it just thinks it should be displaying only on an external.

Brainfog

Hi Billsey,

 

Thanks for the reply.  I'm not sure about that but I have tried the fn+f5 etc and it didn't work. I have also tried taking all power away (battery and power supply) and then holding down power button for 60 seconds to drain all power away. I have removed and cleaned both RAM modules just in case. My next option is to buy a vga to vga cable connected to an external monitor and try and boot it hoping it will display on that. Acer have said it needs them to look at it for a cost of £47.50 exc postage then repairs on top.

billsey

Yeah, if you are out of warranty they'll charge ... and you pretty much have to be out of warranty on that one I think.

 

So there are several things that can go wrong with the display on a laptop. the screen can go bad, the cable that connects the screen to the mainboard can go bad or get disconnected, and on some technology the backlight can go out. The graphics chips on some also have been known to go out. If plugging in an external monitor works then it's probably not the graphics chip, if wiggling the screen while it's on gives some flickers it's probably the cable. Fixing the cable is likely to be the cheapest route if that's what's wrong. Most anything else is probably easier to fix by replacing the laptop rather than trying to resurrect this one.

 

Specs say "15.6" HD 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, high-brightness (220-nit) Acer CineCrystal™ LED-backlit TFT LCD, supporting simultaneous multi-window viewing via Acer GridVista™" which means the backlight could be the culprit. When they go bad you can usually see a faint ghost of the screen, like the brightness was turned down all the way.

Brainfog

Yeah it doesn't look good either way really  . I have tried to wiggle the screen or see if there is any faint picture but it just looks dead. I'm not too fussed about the laptop it's just the photos I have on there of our wedding and our kids etc that I want to rescue. Would it be possible to remove the hard drive on this laptop and swap it into another laptop just to rescue my stuff? Is that possible?

billsey

Yep, that is actually pretty easy, but not the way you envision. You pick up an external case for a 2.5" drive that plugs into your USB port. Put the drive from the old laptop in the case and plug it into the new one. Everything should then be accessed easily. For instance here is one from Amazon for $10. I doubt that's the cheapest since it was third in the list on my search.