Acer Aspire 5517 intermittent boot problem

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forum. I am having an problem with this new notebook and I am hoping someone in the community can give their opinions as to what could be the issue.

I just purchased a new Aspire 5517-5671 Notebook from Newegg. I've had the notebook for 7 days and I am experiencing an intermittent problem with it not booting.

First I can tell you that most of the time the notebook boots up perfectly, but on two occasions in the last 7 days it did not boot.

Let me describe the issue when it does not boot.

I press power button and the unit powers on.
You see the Acer splash screen. This is the screen that says "Press F2 for setup" in the lower left corner.
After 2 to 3 seconds the screen goes blank and the hard drive light does not light or flash.
Then a second later the screen goes black for a couple seconds like it is shutting off.
Next the process repeats itself same as before. Acer splash screen, then blank screen, then Acer splash screen.
It just keeps repeating this.

The first time it did this I decided to press F2 to go to the bios screen which it did. I looked at the bios settings but did not change anything. I exited bios and it started doing the same as above. So I held down the power button until the unit shut off completely, then I pressed power again and this time it booted up perfectly.

Once it boots up the notebook seems to work perfectly. I did all the Windows updates and it time it rebooted just fine with no issues.

The next day I took it to work and did not have any issues, but when I returned home that evening I pulled it out of it's case, plugged it in and turned it on and had the same problem it would not boot to Windows. Also this time when I pressed F2 at the slash screen it would not go to the bios screen. It said "Please wait" then it went back to the Acer splash screen again and started repeating that. I had to hold down the power button as before until it shut down. Pressed power again and then it booted up perfectly normal.

Even though I had installed a few programs I did not think it that was the issues issue but I figured that if I contacted Newegg or Acer that the first thing they would suggest is doing a restore, so I went ahead and did a system restore to put it back to how it was when I received it. That was two days ago and so far I have not experienced the problem again yet. So far I have only installed Office 2007 and I want to give it a couple days to see what happens before installing any more programs.

The notebooks current bios version is 1.09. I see on Acer's support site that the latest bios version for it is 1.10 but it also says it should only be updated if one of Acers customer care people tells you to, so I have not done anything yet.

Sorry for being a little long winded but I wanted to be sure to give you all the info.

Any comments, suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,