Acer 7520 - reboot loop, what are my options?

Hi all,

I had a pretty bad problem with my Acer 7520 (Nvidia 7000M graphics chip) laptop last July. The laptop display started corrupting, and then soon enough my laptop was in the infamous reboot loop, where it starts, stays on for 3-4 seconds, then goes off again, and then repeats.

I've always kept the vents clean so I didn't have much to try in terms of a solution at the time, but I realised that the fact I was trying it over and over again soon led to the laptop doing nothing at all, so I thought that was that.

Then on Christmas day 2012 I stumbled across a video on YouTube of a guy with the exact same laptop and the exact same problem as I have explained above - the reboot loop. It showed him using a hairdryer on the laptop pointing it over the GPU/chipset and soon enough the laptop started up. I thought I'd be out of luck because my 7520 was now doing nothing at all when pressing the power button. No lights, no fan, no start, no nothing. But I gave it a go anyway, and to my amazement the laptop powered up for the first time in months and stayed on (it was in barebones at the time so I couldn't really test anything, but the display came on and I was able to navigate the BIOS and boot from a CD) Later that night though, it started doing the reboot loop again

Now I've been trying the hairdryer thing again though and I can no longer get it to stop boot cycles. Seems it was just a one off thing. Does anybody have any ideas that I could try? I've literally got just the motherboard out with no display or anything, testing it, as I have been reading some people say they have put theirs in the oven at 200c (!) but I don't have the bottle to try this, plus I live in a shared house and it would be quite risky having my motherboard just baking away in the oven!

I went to a PC/Laptop repair shop and inquired about reflowing/reballing but he said it'd be £100-120 - money I do not have right now, and if I did have that money I'd be saving it toward a new laptop, as he wasn't able to guarantee the repair would work.

It'd be a shame to see this laptop go in the bin as I've seen other people having success stories. I want to be able to get it going and put Windows 8 on it whilst it's cheap!!


This is my poor laptop right now!

Any help would be great

Thanks.

Alex

 

*Bump* no ideas? Bin it?! Is it beyond repair?

 

There are not ideas because you've mentioned all possibilities in your post- either re-flow it or replace the mobo entirely.
Other than that you can only give up on it altogether.

I had a situation like that a while ago and I bought a used unit with damaged display and without the HDD and ODD.
Still mobo was fine and so was CPU, RAM, keyboard and PSU.

I paid only £40-50. Admittedly that was a bargain but that's what you're looking for anyway.