Hi all.
I have a laptop here on the bench that I suspect has a faulty motherboard, and I'd like some opinions on whether I'd missed something.
It's an Acer Aspire 5253, AMD E-350 cpu, Win7 HP x64 fully patched. Customer complaint is that sometimes the system would just freeze up, image becomes a bit fuzzy on the screen with some short blue dotted lines appearing all over the screen and the keyboard and mouse would respond. Only remedy is to hard reset the machine.
It happens in all situations, AC power, battery, wifi, LAN etc.
There is no pattern to this. It can happen after 3 weeks, then it would happen 4 times in a day. He might be watching a movie, or just browsing the web, nothing the same for each occurrence.
Naturally, when he brought it to me everything was working fine and I had it for a day doing different stuff to try to stress the system into freezing, but nothing happened. Around an hour after he picked it up he was back with the laptop with the frozen image on the screen to demonstrate. It happened on battery power this time, so it can't be a dirty power issue or something. (I attached two images of the screen)
I hooked up an external monitor but no image was displayed, might be because I couldn't use the Fn key to switch to external because the keyboard wasn't responding. I hooked up an external KB and mouse but they don't seem to be recognized, because the red light under the optical mouse didn't light up.
The computer did recognize when I plugged in the AC adapter, and the corresponding LED lit up and the computer made a beep, but the battery icon in the system tray didn't change to AC because it was frozen.
It doesn't seem to be a HDD issue because this was happening for a few years already (computer was his Mom's but she rarely used it, and reported that this issue existed), and he had changed out the HDD to a Seagate hybrid drive and fresh installed Windows from recovery media and it's still happening. Still, I tested the drive in Gsmartcontrol and via Seagate's program and there were no errors. One thing that's a bit wierd is that the SMART data in Gsmartcontrol (in Parted Magic and in Linux Mint) report a failing error on the end-to-end attribute but it still passed the long test, but the SMART data on Seagate's own tests did not show a failing for the end-to-end attribute.
Tested the RAM for a few hours: OK.
Updated BIOS to latest: still occurred.
Checked for malware, viruses, rootkits, online and offline: all clean. Besides this was happening after a clean install of Windows.
Nothing interesting in Event Viewer or Device Manager.
I tore the thing apart and blew out some dust and re-applied the thermal paste, but I don't think that it was overheating because then it should shut down, not freeze and show those blue lines.
I don't think it's a GPU issue due to the fact that the keyboard/mouse freeze up as well, and externals aren't being recognized.
I ran a D7 stress test (CPU/RAM) and it passed OK.
At the moment it's running fine and I'm leaning toward diagnosing a bad mobo. Did I miss anything? Does anyone have any experience with this model laptop or anything else that showed similar symptoms?
Any help would be appreciated. (sorry for the long post.)
I have a laptop here on the bench that I suspect has a faulty motherboard, and I'd like some opinions on whether I'd missed something.
It's an Acer Aspire 5253, AMD E-350 cpu, Win7 HP x64 fully patched. Customer complaint is that sometimes the system would just freeze up, image becomes a bit fuzzy on the screen with some short blue dotted lines appearing all over the screen and the keyboard and mouse would respond. Only remedy is to hard reset the machine.
It happens in all situations, AC power, battery, wifi, LAN etc.
There is no pattern to this. It can happen after 3 weeks, then it would happen 4 times in a day. He might be watching a movie, or just browsing the web, nothing the same for each occurrence.
Naturally, when he brought it to me everything was working fine and I had it for a day doing different stuff to try to stress the system into freezing, but nothing happened. Around an hour after he picked it up he was back with the laptop with the frozen image on the screen to demonstrate. It happened on battery power this time, so it can't be a dirty power issue or something. (I attached two images of the screen)
I hooked up an external monitor but no image was displayed, might be because I couldn't use the Fn key to switch to external because the keyboard wasn't responding. I hooked up an external KB and mouse but they don't seem to be recognized, because the red light under the optical mouse didn't light up.
The computer did recognize when I plugged in the AC adapter, and the corresponding LED lit up and the computer made a beep, but the battery icon in the system tray didn't change to AC because it was frozen.
It doesn't seem to be a HDD issue because this was happening for a few years already (computer was his Mom's but she rarely used it, and reported that this issue existed), and he had changed out the HDD to a Seagate hybrid drive and fresh installed Windows from recovery media and it's still happening. Still, I tested the drive in Gsmartcontrol and via Seagate's program and there were no errors. One thing that's a bit wierd is that the SMART data in Gsmartcontrol (in Parted Magic and in Linux Mint) report a failing error on the end-to-end attribute but it still passed the long test, but the SMART data on Seagate's own tests did not show a failing for the end-to-end attribute.
Tested the RAM for a few hours: OK.
Updated BIOS to latest: still occurred.
Checked for malware, viruses, rootkits, online and offline: all clean. Besides this was happening after a clean install of Windows.
Nothing interesting in Event Viewer or Device Manager.
I tore the thing apart and blew out some dust and re-applied the thermal paste, but I don't think that it was overheating because then it should shut down, not freeze and show those blue lines.
I don't think it's a GPU issue due to the fact that the keyboard/mouse freeze up as well, and externals aren't being recognized.
I ran a D7 stress test (CPU/RAM) and it passed OK.
At the moment it's running fine and I'm leaning toward diagnosing a bad mobo. Did I miss anything? Does anyone have any experience with this model laptop or anything else that showed similar symptoms?
Any help would be appreciated. (sorry for the long post.)
Attachments
Last edited:
