Bizarre Laptop Boot Problem: Only Boots Once Per Day?!

Hi all,

About 3 months ago I poured water all over my Acer Aspire 5920. I immediately removed all componants and left to dry for a couple of weeks.

Now, the laptop only boots once per day! It's the strangest thing.

I have no battery installed, and when I plug the power cable in the blue light indicating there's power comes on on the laptop. However, hitting the power button does absolutely nothing. No whirring, no additional LEDs, nothing at all. Wait 24 hours and bingo, it boots no problem.

I tried a few days ago going into recovery console and restoring factory settings. Weirdly this resulted in the laptop working just fine for a few days, before returning to its old self. When it does boot it seems to be running a bit slow.

This is really confusing me, because I'd assume - due to the water - it was a hardware issue; yet the fact the factory settings restore helped temporarily seems to indicate software issues. Or a combination of both?! It's frustrating because the thing clearly works, it's just being stubborn.

One thing I considered - do laptops have inbuilt safety mechanisms for water spills? I'd spilt water on it once before and it instantly turned off, and wouldn't switch back on for 24 hours - was that a design feature? If so, is it possible it's now malfunctioning?

Switched lapppy on today and got the following error message, after which it refused to fully boot.

http://i747.photobucket.com/albums/xx114/tjubert/lappyerror.jpg?t=1281525010

Any help / ideas hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance guys!

Tom

 

EDIT: Just a thought about the operating system curing the problem temporarily and now your operating system is not found that is most likely a HDD problem. After getting angry one day and punching my old laptop I caused damage to the HDD and this caused intermitent problems until it gave me the same message. Water inside the HDD is not going to be sorted by drying it out it will leave residue on the disk itself. Worth a shot.

If you pour water onto a chipboard you would assume that the turning itself off is it shorting out unless it is water cooled I dont think it would recognise being hit by water.

The only problem with it shorting is that means a permanent hardware problem could occur from the voltage pumping through it at the time of the water hitting it.

Im not an expert but it may be a simple fix or a new board either way if your risking such a high voltage then your running a risk.

EBAY - Spares and Repairs.

New Laptop + Cup Holder!

 

Thanks for your help! I had half a suspicion it might be the HDD. Didn't really fancy splashing out unless I got confirmation. I think I'll give this a try.

I figure my best bet might be to just grab a new drive for £30, seems same difference on ebay sapres repairs.

Few questions, if I may...
1. I'm really no expert on laptops... just any 2.5" SATA should do, right?
Western Digital 120GB 2.5" Hard Drive SATAII.. | Ebuyer.com

2. Is it at all possible to plug a standard PC SATA hard drive into the laptop just to check the theory? I had a quick look, and the ends of the SATA cables in my desktop seem to be mirrored to what's inside the laptop.

3. Do I need to worry about any crazy Acer protection if/when I install Win7 on the new HD? I've always built my own desktops, but I know these brand laptops are a little more 'closed' systems.

 

1. Yep any SATA 2.5 HDD will run with your laptop so just get a cheap one and try it out.

2. I cant answer this as I have not tried but I would say yes if the connection ARE identical but obviously it will not fit inside your laptop. Check this out before attempting though as I am not a desktop man.

3. I installed a new HDD into my 6920G and installed my new copy of Windows 64 straight onto it with no problems at all and I was using Vista 32 bit factory before that.

However that does not explain why your lappy does not start up sometimes and only kicks in after 24 hours? Even without a HDD it would still reach BIOS during startup so your problems may lie deeper.