Aspire 5002WLMi overheated and now dead?

Hi all. I bought an Acer Aspire 5002 almost a year ago and I've been quite happy with it the whole time. My only real complaints are the very noisy fan and that it seems to run pretty hot in general. A couple of weeks ago I forgot to put the laptop into "standby" before putting it into my backpack and heading home. That night (after approx 6 hours), when I went to start it up again, everything seemed fine until I moved it slightly and the screen displayed a bunch of vertical lines and the laptop froze up. I don't believe I treated it any more harshly that day that any other day so I don't think some kind of knock or bump set it off.

Ever since then, it's been difficult to start and will either freeze up or flick to a series of vertical lines with the slightest movement or bump though when I can get it working, it works just as well as ever. This leads me to believe it's NOT the CPU or hard-drive that are at fault here. This weekend, I went piece by piece, pulling components off and then retrying the machine to see if I could cause the same troubles - I stripped it right down to the motherboard using an external monitor, keyboard and mouse both with and without battery and got the same results. Part of my "testing" was to put a little pressure on the motherboard using a small plastic bottle I had handy and when I did that near the Northbridge, the freezing/messed up screen would happen pretty reliably.

The short version of all this is that I think my motherboard is toast and I feel that I've pretty much ruled out all the other components of my system. I've put the whole thing back together and I can't even get it to start anymore - all I get are flashing LEDs.

Are there any good sources of motherboards for Acers in Canada? Any models similar to the 5002 that I should look at?

Thanks!

Greg

 

It may just be the motherboard, but it could be the graphics card. I think that your particular Acer, has its card mounted on the motherboard. If the notebook is still under warranty, then you could try that. However, that may not work, as you have stripped the notebook down.

 

I had the same thing happen to my old Dell Inspiron and after ruling out every component and wasting $200 on a replacement LCD (that's what Dell 'Tech Support claimed it was!!), I came to the conclusion that it was indeed the mother board. I never found out because I sold it "as is", but my screen did the whole flickering and vertical line thing.

Zero is right, the Acer 3000/5000 series have a SiS card mounted on the motherboard...You shouldn't have a hard time finding a replacement motherboard and video card fairly inexpensively. I'm pretty sure they are all the same in the 3000/5000 series. The only differentation is the 3000 has the Sempron chip, whereas the 5000 has the Turion chip.

 

good replies, thanks for that...

I've been poking around a little on the 'net and you guys are right - not hard at all to find the motherboard, just a little harder trusting internet purchases of used parts
I'd been wondering about trying to find a card from a machine other than a 500o series - it looks like there are a few that even have more features like firewire and so on, though I'm not sure if any of those are AMD compatible.

Thanks for the help!

Greg

 

If you are going to purchase a new motherboard, try and get the same one as you have. Trying to find one that other features, may result in other problems. It is much safer and easier to install the motherboard for your specific model.