Acer G9-793-79V5 - Predator Logo Sometimes Doesn't Show at Boot-Up & Screen Remains Black
My Predator 17 (G9-793-79V5) developed a problem roughly six to eight weeks ago, where sometimes, when I turn it on, the keyboard lights up; the screen backlight comes on, and the light indicating the SSD is being accessed flashes, but the Predator logo never displays, and the screen just displays all black (although, as I said, I can see that the LED backlight is on). I also get a brief, momentary (like, ½ second) flash of a distorted image, almost like static or "snow", as displayed on an old tube TV, but that goes away, leaving the screen black. At that point, the only thing I can do is press & hold the power button, until the unit shuts down. Then, as soon as I turn it back on, it boots normally, first showing the Predator logo, then the Windows sign-in screen (I do sometimes still get that brief flash of static or whatever, but it boots normally after that). If I'm using the laptop and restart it, such as when restarting after installing a new program or an update, it usually always boots normally. This just seems to happen if it's been off for a while. If I manually shut it down, via the Windows Start Menu, and the turn it back on, it seems to boot normally.
This seemed to start happening, although I realize this could be purely a coincidence, one day when I kept tapping one of the function keys - I think it was the F5 key - during boot-up. I had read somewhere; and it might not have even been applicable to my particular Predator model, that hitting F5 during boot-up would access a recovery menu, which is what I was trying to do. After the third or fourth attempt (because it kept booting into Windows), I got that burst of static/distorted image, and it's been happening ever since.
This has also happened when Windows put the laptop into Sleep, before I adjusted the power plan to never put the laptop to Sleep, when on A/C power (I've reinstalled Windows 10 a couple of times in the last week or two, related to attempting to put Windows 7 on my machine, which didn't work out so well). When I pressed the power button to bring it out of sleep, I got that distorted image briefly, and a few times the screen remained black (with the backlight on, I think). Once, I connected my external monitor to the laptop, and Windows appeared on that, although the laptop screen was dark.
I'll have to check (my PC is off right now; I'm a tractor-trailer driver, and I just pulled into a rest area to post this question), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the latest BIOS/UEFI firmware, as offered/shown in the Acer support page for my unit.
Anyone have any ideas what's wrong? This is really irritating!
