A6Ja screen blacks, but nothing damaged

Hello everyone,

I hope there is someone who can help me with my issue, because I don't understand it anymore.
I've got an Asus A6Ja (with Ati x1600) and after I flashed my bios (to get a longer battery time, which I really needed) everything kept on working. I'm not saying it has anything to do with the bios, just saying what happened after each other.
Yesterday morning when I started up Betty (my laptop's name) I got a black screen, right away. I then hooked up my laptop to an external monitor and through that I deleted the drivers. After a reboot, the screen was working fine again and I installed the drivers provided by Asus for my Ati card. Yesterday I've been using Betty just fine and sometimes had Betty in sleeping mode.
This morning, when I booted my laptop again, the screen did not work, again. I did the same as yesterday (deleted the drivers) but then the screen was still black. I just had the black screen on, attached Betty to another external monitor and there I had a black screen as well. Then I rebooted Betty while unplugging the external monitor, and my laptop screen was working fine again!

Now I haven't installed any drivers yet and want to keep Betty on as long as possible until I know what I should do next. Since everything is working fine sometimes, I don't think there's any real hardware failure. I hope I can get some help here!

Thank you very much in advance!

Joost

 

It is the BIOS, since you encounter this error before you enter Windows. I would flash back to the old BIOS and see if that fixes your problems. Contact the reseller you bought this from and get the stock BIOS from them, or check it out on ASUS's website. Hope Betty gets well soon!

 

I downgraded the bios to version 213 instead of 217 (using winflash /nodate). Then it rebooted and gave a message which also included "checksum bad" and the options F1 and F2 on a MegaTrend DOS page. Then, after I got rid of the sound of the startingup through the bios, the computer restarted... Black screen again...

Maybe the BIOS was not fine enough? What should I do?

Thank you!

Joost

EDIT: Could it maybe be the BIOS battery? I wouldn't guess that, because the bios sometimes does function properly and sometimes does not, but still, could that be the problem here?

 

I have contacted Asus like last thursday. The day after I got an e-mail which instructed me to make a fresh install of Windows using F9 > option 2. That didn't work, so I e-mailed back. Yesterday I got a message that asked me if I wanted to send it in. 15 minutes later I mailed Asus USA back that I did indeed want that. It took one day to again get an e-mail back. Now they gave me a case ID # and told me they would send RMA number and instructions later. Probably I'll have to wait another day.

I bought my laptop in the Netherlands, so I'm under Global Warranty. Is this normal support for Asus USA?