Laptop will not restart

I have an Acer Aspire V5-572P laptop running windows 8.1.  The other day it was running like normal, but I went to restart and the backlight didnt come on, nor did the acer spash screen, but I could hear the hardrive running and the little blue light was lit that indicates it is powered on.  But thats it.  I tried forcing shutdown by holding down the power button then rebooting, but the same thing.

Now the strange part.  If i let my computer sit for several hours, it boots up like normal.  But if i try to restart, it goes back to the blackscreen mode and I have to wait another several hours before it does anything.  Additionally, I am not sure if its coincidence or not, but today I pressed the power button and nothing was happening, but when I pressed fn+esc, the backlight immediately came on and the boot process started.

What I've done so far after some reading - 

I've updated the Bios after reading about using a flashdrive to flash the Bios to fix black-screen issues on other acer laptops.  That didnt work. when it automatically restarted after updating, it went to blackscreen.

I did a system restore to about a month ago when it was working fine.  I also turned off automatic updates so it woudnt immediately reinstall the updates I un-did with the restore.   That didnt work.  It went to blackscreen after automatically restarting during the process.  Later that day when i got it to boot it said the system restore was successful. but again, it made no difference when I tested it out with a restart.

I tried restarting the battery using the little reset hole on the bottom and a safety pin. That didnt do anything either.

I also made sure the screen was not turned off or in tv mode by pressing fn+f5 and fn+f6 during the time it was in its blackscreen mode.

Any other ideas? or has anybody experience anything similar? 

As things stand, I am just going to not turn off my laptop.

Thanks