Acer Notebook Boot Problem & Deak Keyboard

[Mr.Mike]

HI all,

I'm working on a client's Acer 5740-5513 notebook (Win 7) that he said would start to boot then beeped and had a black screen. He said it started happening after replacing the original battery.

At my bench, I tested the battery, connectors and power adapter; all good. When fired up, the ACER/Phoenix BIOS screen flashed for a few seconds he screen went black and then five very short beeps sounded. I pulled the battery and restarted with the power adapter only. There was a boot, but it went right to a user-locked screen with a switch user option. I clicked switch user and clicked his avatar. Then the screen and the keyboard/touch pad froze and the screen went black. No task manager, no access at all. Next I shut down. When restarted, a Windows Error Recovery screen showed up but keyboard and touch pad were still dead so I am unable to use safe mode.

The online service manual says there's no such beep codes matching five beeps. It also said if I pressed Fn+ESC it would boot from another, smaller BIOS (used when and if there was an unsuccessful flash of the BIOS). Of course, pressing Fn+ESC on startup did nothing.

Next, thinking it might be a RAM issue, I changed out the 4Gb of memory with known good DIMMs and no joy. So now I think it's a bad system board/component(s) or a corrupted/defective BIOS, not Win OS issue.

Any experience you might have with something like this you care to share would be welcome.

Thanks in advance

 

[DocGreen]

Can you get it to boot to a disc? Maybe run some diagnostics and see what you can find?

 

[Captain Spaulding]

Does a USB Mouse keyboard work?

 

[PC-MOT]

Sounds like a damaged Mobo to me, could he have fried something while changing battery?

 

[Mr.Mike]

Can you get it to boot to a disc? Maybe run some diagnostics and see what you can find?

Thanks, I thought of that.

No can do. The keyboard doesn't respond to commands to boot from a different source.

 

[Mr.Mike]

Does a USB Mouse keyboard work?

Tried a usb keyboard. The freeze happens immediately after the POST screen. I appreciate the input.

 

[Mr.Mike]

Sounds like a damaged Mobo to me, could he have fried something while changing battery?

I am leaning your way on the mobo being the problem. I'm not sure exactly how the new battery would cause the issue.

Thanks for your comment.

 

[PC-MOT]

May just be a coincidence, or is it a genuine battery or a cheap chinese copy, could have power spiked?
It may even have been going awry before, so he bought a battery to resolve it...who knows?

 

[Mr.Mike]

May just be a coincidence, or is it a genuine battery or a cheap chinese copy, could have power spiked?
It may even have been going awry before, so he bought a battery to resolve it...who knows?

After thinking about what you said here, you are probably right. I spoke with the client and he mentioned that he "just found a battery for $30 online and put it in and charged it up." The battery looks to be brand new and undamaged and charges up fine. Same for the leads on the battery and in the notebook - fine. I suppose since he did it the replacement himself, he may of done something when changing out the old battery for the new one.

Oh well, time to break the bad news. And so it goes....

Thanks PC-MOT.

 

[Mercenary Roadie]

Cheap batteries tend to be missing the PCB that controlsthe over charge and other stuff

 

[NYJimbo]

Cheap batteries tend to be missing the PCB that controlsthe over charge and other stuff

They cannot "miss" the pcb, if they did they would never work. The batteries might suck for other reasons, like cheap components, but not because they lack the hardware that is needed for them to work in the first place.

 

[Mr.Mike]

Cheap batteries tend to be missing the PCB that controlsthe over charge and other stuff

I've heard that too though I've never seen it. Who knows where the battery came from. Guess he wanted to do it himself.