Travelmate 8204 break down after 1 day.

I have run into some problems with my one day old Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi laptop. I bought it brand new and sealed from eBay.

I set it up, and it was working fine for the first few hours of use - and then out of no where, I got a blue screen, and the machine restarted (I was running new installed Winamp) .
It was booting back up into windows, and just before it got to the welcome screen, it gave me a blue screen again, and rebooted. It did this another 4 or 5 times, I tried getting it into boot mode, and it did the same thing. The next time it tried to boot, the screen strangely went to half size, and again it blue screened a few seconds into loading windows. It restarted again, but this time, there was absolutely nothing on the screen. I tried another few times to restart it, but still the screen just didn't display anything.
I tried connecting the laptop to an external monitor, using the VGA port, and the first time I tried it, it worked for about 10 seconds...but then the external monitor went off, and again I couldn't get it to display on the monitor again.

So basically the laptop is unusable, it just won't output anything on the screen at all. I have no idea what has caused it, as it was working 100% fine, then out of no where it got progressively worse in the space of about 30 minutes.

I didn't get time to see what the error message said, because obviously you only get about a second to read the blue screen message before the machine restarts. Any ideas at all? As you can imagine, I'm panicking quite a lot, because I'm flying blind with everything - with no screen to see what's going on. Any help offered would be really appreciated.

Thank you in advance,
Simon.

 

Hi Simon,
Sorry to hear that. After one of acer "repairs" I had problme with LCD going completely black on random basis. It was like lcd couldnt start, had to restrat it to get to normal .. or not. Maybe you have it permament as oppose to me when i had it 1 in 10 or so ...
Can you just confirm that your lcd is black from moment you turn laptop on or when windows starts to load ?

I guess only option is Acer repair centre. If you live in Uk, I am sorry for you, as I have my laptop for 7 weeks already with them ... and it is 4th time with the same problem.

Cheers,
Peter

 

It definitely sounds like a hardware failure if the LCD is not displaying anything now, probably with the video card itself if the LCD still doesn't display anything. If the screen starts displaying stuff again, try getting into safe mode by pressing F8 as the computer reboots (after you see the Acer splash screen of the BIOS, starting pounding on the F8). If Window boots fine, then there's a driver error with something.

Post any more details if you get any and we'll try to help.

 

Hi,

Thank you for your responses.

Just to confirm, the screen does not display anything at all. It's just like the laptop is off, a signal is just not sent to the LCD. I don't think it's a problem with the video card. It seems as though the machine might have set the output to external monitor (Fn + F5) but pressing that combination does nothing. I think this issue is just a side effect or knock on effect of the main cause/problem, whatever that may be.

Some people I have asked for for advice, have said it might be worth clearing the CMOS. However, I'm not sure how to do that, where it is, and doing so would void the warranty. But in theory, I think that would help too.

There is only so much you can do without being able to see what you're doing...so I'm not sure if anything else can be done.

I have emailed the seller from eBay, and am waiting on a reply. I guess the Acer warranty will come into play - I'm not really looking forward to that as I have read about how terrible their customer service is.

Thank you again,
Simon.

 

if you are in the us, customer service is not that bad. the ones in temple, tx took care of me lickety split!

if you do get the screen to work at all, hold down f8 to boot it in safe mode before any drivers can screw it up.

also, check your memory. make sure it's seated correctly. and try take 1 stick out at a time to see if one is messed up.

 

I am in the UK. And trying to boot up in boot mode resulted in the same thing, after about 3 seconds of loading the devices etc, it blue screened and restarted. Then the screen started screwing up after that, as mentioned in my first post.

 

Hi! Sorry about your computer!

Honestly, due to the errors described, I don't think you'll be able to repair it by yourself (unless your got spare parts to test on your laptop)... in fact, you may even brake it much more trying to turn it on (like a shortcircuit or energy overload that may affect more regions over the boards). Take advantage of your warranty, or ask your eBay seller to exchange it (I guess it may be included on DOA (Dead On Arrival) policies... I'm Brazilian, I don't know US laws, but I think you have the rights to change a defective merchandise to a brand new in a brief space o time, like days or weeks).

Let me see if I understood what's happening: your LCD simply doesn't work (but your computer seems to load Windows and shows HDD activity)? Or the laptop just dropped dead (lights on?)?

This is strange... the blue screen error is too generic, it may be simply a bad Windows drivers installation, or more complex issues, like damaged HDD, faulty RAM memory modules (most of the cases). But now it affected the display. As I said, maybe your attempt to repair it damaged another part of the laptop (or the same error got worse). Don't get me wrong, I'm nothing saying it's your fault, of course! These things happens and this is an unexpected behavior of the system, we can't predict it.

And I may be wrong, who knows? Maybe tomorrow your laptop wakes up as if nothing happened.

If you know stuff about computers, all I can tell you to do is to remove your battery and press the power button, then load the battery again and try to turn it on. This way you'll clear all energy left on capacitors and circuits designed to hold a few energy. If this doesn't work, remove the battery and press the pwr up button... then, leave the lap without the battery for a few days. This may look silly, but worked to me as a miracle in some cases (on desktop and laptop computers).

One other thing...
Do you know if you got 2 RAM memory modules installed? You may change their position. The first bank is always read on power on... if this module is damaged, the lap will not turn on. Try to turn it on with one module too.
And be careful! If you never did this on a real computer, please, I advise you to don't do it on your laptop!!!!!!!

There are other things to do, like connect your HDD to a desktop (you'll need an adaptor) and run diagnostic tools, but I guess this is all I can remember that you can do for now.

Good Luck!
Please, keep posting your progress, OK?

 

Hi Daredevil, thank you for your suggestions. I have actually sent the machine back to the seller now, and he will have a look at it.

That is correct, the LCD didn't turn on. But there was hard drive activity. When I received the laptop, I immediately changed the boot sequence to check the DVD drive first, and that's all I changed in the bios. So when I put the XP CD in, you could clearly here it spin up and read it...so that strongly suggests the machine was running through POST and beyond.

I didn't try reinserting any RAM modules or the hard drive or anything like that, as I didn't know how that would effect the warranty.

I will let you know how I get on as soon as I hear from the seller. Thank you all for your responses!

 

Okay, I have just had a call from the seller. He said he has fixed it, he didn't say it exactly, but I think he cleared the CMOS by taking the battery out. He said it was a problem with the bios.

He was actually suggesting quite strongly I had broken it! Which made me quite angry, I hadn't even done anything to the blasted thing. But anyway, I'm getting it back on Friday, so hopefully I'll be able to get properly aquainted with it this time!

Thank you all again for your support, it was much appreciated.

Regards,
Simon.