Acer aspire 7520 Notebook problem

[kaihirst]

Hi all,

Not been here for a looonnnggg while, as ive been stupidly busy with work and such. Anyways here it is.

Client came in to see me today with an unrelated issue and brought this up with me. Its an Acer aspire 7520 notebook with a particular issue. What it does is power up and show the hard drive light flashing green as if its booting up, the power light is on, fans come on as normal, then abrou 3 seconds later, it powers down immediately. no boot screen or bios functionality enablement. Then it keeps looping this constantly until you pull the battery out. have performed the same test over with the battery pulled out and the same thing occurs. Have checked the our knowledge base, acers knowledge base, our support technician, MSDN, google and some technical gurus that I have on my contacts list, and they dont seem to know. Have also performed a PAT test on this, voltage, a PFR test and a ohms test and all show as normal.

Any suggestions on this one??

Cheers all

Kai

[TheBigB]

Well I would check every easily replaceable part which in this case is only the memory and the hard drive(s). While your at it, just clean out the dust off the fans. This acer model can get quite overheated if you don't clean it every once in a while.
Shouldn't be much work; only one big back-plate.

If that doesn't solve the problem, you're probably better off sending it to acer. It might be a mainboard problem or processor defect. It either is, or is just outside warranty, so anyway it's probably worth the money.

By the way; does the hard drive led give a significant code, or is it random activity?
Some Phoenix bios versions have a signaling system in which it gives beeps or flashes at an interval if it detects something is wrong.

[kaihirst]

hi Big,

No specific beep or flash that is noticeable at all. The hard drive light flashes three times as if its booting to bios, the power light stays on, then it powers off, the repeats the process over and over again. the only thing I can remotely thing of is that it is a pwoer management problem, but then it would read on the voltage or resistance ohm meter.

Its quite cool actually as Ive fixed loads of stuff before from old cheapo stuff to the msot expensive stuff ive ever seen, and most of the time its just run of the mill boring fix stuff. This is actually quite cool!!!!

Probably wil send it to acer, as its stil lworth some money...

Cheers

[Lord Orwell]

three flashes is an error code. Try pulling out the hard drive and seeing if it boots to bios. The drive may have locked up or shorted and the acer is powering off to prevent more damage. What you are describing as "looping" though i don't understand. It may simply not be posting. unless the fans are cycling?

[markyd85]

Hi, was wondering if you ever found the problem to this. My 7520 boots, fan comes on then flashing power light and hard drive light continuously until i remove the battery. If i apply pressure to the board it boots and even loads windows but eventually fails when i release pressure. I have heat gunned the motherboard with no luck. Any more suggestions would greatly be received. Could it be the processor?

[stanav]

I just "fixed" an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop that behaves EXACTLY as you described here. I spent a good couple hours trying to perform various tests to pin point the problem and guess what, it's the charger that is bad. The odd thing is the green light on the charger still lights up when plugged in thus I never suspected it's bad. Anyway, after much frustration, I measure the voltage output of the charger and bang! Zero volts. And it all now came clear on the laptop boot behavior. Since charger is bad, the laptop battery doesn't get recharged. The user doesn't know it and kept on using the laptop until the battery ran down and the laptop shut itself off. Any subsequence boot, the computer turns on for a couple seconds then dies immediately because of the battery doesn't have enough charge left.

[Lord Orwell]

i wish you could fix my laptop i sold to a nice lady. The United states postal service broke it in shipment. screen is cracked.

[stanav]

i wish you could fix my laptop i sold to a nice lady. The United states postal service broke it in shipment. screen is cracked.

So you got the laptop returned along with a bad Ebay rating?

[Lord Orwell]

So you got the laptop returned along with a bad Ebay rating?

no i have 100% rating. I told her in an email i will do whatever it takes to make it right. She only paid $50 with shipping. I'll be better off just sending her a check.

[nolubez79]

Having the same problem with my Acer 7520. Powers on then shuts off in a continuous loop until the battery is taken out.

[nolubez79]

Did you ever solve your issue? my laptop is doing the same thing.

[Nightwalker83]

Having the same problem with my Acer 7520. Powers on then shuts off in a continuous loop until the battery is taken out.

Let me guess! If you can only get it to function properly by plugging it in to the mains then it seems like a battery problem.