acer 5600 screen issues.

In the past week the screen on my Acer Aspire 5600 computer has been giving me problems. the initial acer screen appears perfect, as does the Windows XP loading screen. after Windows finishes loading, the screen goes black (which is normal) and then the login screen appears. however, when it's giving me this problem, the login screen appears blurry, scrambled, and completely unusable. it's difficult to describe, I can provide a picture if needed.

at the time I was using Ubuntu 8.04, but it only happened occasionally. the frequency of the problem kept increasing. A couple of days ago I wiped my hard drive and installed Windows XP, and the problem kept appearing at the same increasing rate. now I can barely get it to work at all.

the last time it was working, I tried upgrading the bios, since logically this is probably not a hardware problem, but the program supplied by Acer Europe would not allow me to flash the bios.

thanks in advance!

 

what vidoe chip does your notebook have in it?

the fact that it occurs at regular intervals could indicate a hardware problem due to HEAT or even BAD VIDEO RAM... but if you have an NVIDIA Graphics chip then that may be a good place to start pointing fingers

the fact that the ACER BIOS screen and the XP boot-up screen show up fine makes me think that you have a DRIVER PROBLEM... but neither of those screens are up long enough or use enough VIDEO RAM to cause a problem to present it's self...

i'm leaning toward an issue w/ the GPU or VIDEO RAM...

MORE INFO ABOUT YOUR SYSTEM IS NEEDED for anyone here to get anymore exact.

 

I'm getting an issue similar to this. When I boot the computer there is a black screen which slowly bleeds white from the bottom up and saturates the entire screen. It's frozen, nothing loads at all. No graphics. I know the computer is working still because when I wiggle the screen back and forth the graphics will occasionally update themselves and I can get another frozen image on the screen. Like the first poster explained, it's kind of hard to explain. I will take some pictures of it soon.

The original poster seems to be having the same issue as me so that's my reason for bumping this thread. This is the only case of this that I can find on the internet.

 

What GPU do you have.

Also, have you tried plugging in an external monitor to the laptop. If the external works then the issue lies within the screen, if the external monitor doesn't work then it could be the GPU.

 

Ah! Good call, I will try that next chance I have to use the machine. Guessing this weekend, but I'll see. It's my friends laptop, so they'll have to bring it over to me.

If it doesn't post on the PC, then it's the GPU. I'm gonna guess that it will though, because the problem used to be you could 'rock the display' like just open and close the laptop a few times and it would fix it.

If it's not the GPU, do you think it's the LCD panel, the inverter, or the cable? Those are my 3 guesses for what's wrong. I can buy the part if it's determinable at all. Let me get a pic now, maybe that can clarify.

 

Nevermind. My friend got it repaired at a local computer shop for 260$... The repair would have only been like 20$ total to buy the part. Uhg...

 

You would have to know which part to buy though....

The guys that fixed it do repairs on a daily basis so they probably know how to analyse and hammer the problem down to one specific component.

Glad all is working now

 

Glad it's working, shame about the cost though. If the part was $20 I would guess it was the inverter.

 

I'll have to verify it when she get's back that laptop. Then anyone else who finds this thread on Google with this issue will know where to look. (I found this on google with the query "aspire 5600 screen issue")

Pretty sure it was the inverter though. Cause it was fixed the next day, nothing had to be ordered. Either they had the inverter which is for 20+ different models (I looked, same is used in other common laptops across multiple brands) or they just happened to have another LCD...