Acer AN-515-51 Completely Unresponsive - Black Screen, Fans Spin, No BIOS

Hi everyone,

I’m having a serious issue with my Acer AN-515-51-755X laptop—it won’t power on properly anymore, and I could really use some help figuring out what’s wrong.

Here’s the full story:

Originally, the laptop came with a single-slot 8GB RAM stick and a mid-range SSD. I decided to upgrade the hardware, so I purchased a new, faster SSD and 16GB of RAM (2x8GB). Unfortunately, the new RAM caused blue screen errors, although the new SSD worked fine.

I installed Windows 10 Pro 64-bit on the new SSD and reverted to using the original single 8GB RAM. So currently, the system is still running with that original 8GB RAM. However, after the OS installation, I noticed a performance drop instead of improvement. The system became sluggish, frequently froze, and would randomly shut down or reboot.

I suspected a BIOS-related issue due to the hardware changes, so I removed both the BIOS battery and the main battery to reset it. That made things worse—now the laptop doesn’t power on at all.

Current behavior:

-When I press the power button, the keyboard lights come on.

-Input devices are detected.

-It makes a chime when plugging/unplugging the power cable.

-Initially, the fans spin very slowly (or not at all), then ramp up after ~30 seconds, then cycle on and off continuously.

-The screen stays completely black—no Acer logo, no POST, no BIOS access.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

-Removed SSD and HDD completely

-Swapped in different RAM and SSD

-Tested on an external monitor — no change

-Attempted to boot from a USB Linux drive (with no internal drives connected) — still no output or response

At this point, I’m stuck. There are signs of life, but no display, no BIOS, and no boot.

Any suggestions on how to proceed or further diagnose the issue would be greatly appreciated.

During one of my latest attempts, I saw a warning message (shown below). I believe it appeared because there were no drives connected at the time. After seeing this message, I plugged in a disk and a USB drive with Linux installed, but the system returned to its previous state—completely unresponsive again. It feels like the laptop is locking itself up somehow.

Thank you!

Accepted answers

All comments

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/724549/acer-an-515-51-completely-unresponsive-black-screen-fans-spin-no-bios

Hi, this is a 2017 model and the battery and/or adapter may be bad after 8 years. You can try this: Power drain + CMOS reset: Open the back of the laptop and disconnect the battery cable from the motherboard. Locate the CMOS module (with 2 twisted wires Red and Black under the battery) and remove the coin battery. Shorten the +/- terminals inside the CMOS capsule for 2 seconds with a bended paperclip and put the coin battery back with the + sign facing up, close the CMOS capsule. Next, press the Power Button on the keyboard for 10-15 seconds after that reconnect the battery cable to the motherboard. Close the laptop, plug-in the adapter and try to boot. If you can't boot with a Windows10 USB Recovery drive and you have replaced the adapter and battery I recommend to take the laptop to an Acer endorsed PC workshop near you to check the power rail.

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/724549/acer-an-515-51-completely-unresponsive-black-screen-fans-spin-no-bios

You need to do a Hard Reset first to see if your Nitro AN515-61 EC, Chipset or bios chips are not frozen and stopping the image from being projected to your laptops screen or the external monitor through its HDMI port, but my feeling is that your AN515-51 laptop has a classic fried/shorted dedicate gpu that these gaming laptops get after a while, especially for a 7 years old laptop like the AN515-51.

Hard Reset - disconnect and take the main battery out first, then press the power key for 10 seconds to release all power within the laptop, then disconnect the bios battery and short this batteries plug at the mainboard +&- pins to reset CMOS, then take the ram out and leave the laptop like that for 30min so that the laptops chips reset, afterwards, then reconnect all components and with the ram only connect 1x ram module and alternate these modules to see if the ram is not faulty, as a faulty ram could cause a no screen at boot.

Also, make sure that you have updated to the proper M.2 SSD which is the PCIe 3 x4 lane type drive and the proper ram (see the Crucial ram upgrade guide) for this laptop, which is the 260-pin SODIMM 1.2V DDR4-2400MT/s CL-17 NORMAL type ram at max total of 32 GB (2x 16GB modules into its two ram modules) and you didn't buy the XMP overclocked type ram, as that type of ram is not suitable for this laptop and that can also cause a no image to both the laptop screen and to its HDMI port.

After you have done the Hard Reset and you have the correct ram and the laptop still has a black screen and no image, and also the HDMI port does not project an image to an external monitor, your AN515-51 laptop has a fried/shorted NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 or GTX 1050Ti whichever gpu your laptop has, as this is a common fault with gaming latops like your AN515-51 especially for an old 7 year laptop like you have.

You need to take this laptop to a technician so that they can disable the NVidia gpu so you can use the laptop with the cpu Intel HD Graphics only and get an image.

But and if you want a dedicated gpu, then you need to buy a new mainboard (that are not expensive on Ali Express) and fit/swap this board yourself with a new board, as this is not a very hard job and any computer savvy person can do this swap. Good luck and hope this helps you out to sort this problem out.

The below list are the Acer listed mainboards for the AN515-51 laptop from its Acer service guide, search the web and see if you can buy a cheap replacement for your laptop and swap the old board with a working board, as its the cheapest option to fix your laptop yourself.