Shoutbox

Hey.

I hope people don't mind me asking for a bit of tech advice but I'm having a laptop situation ¬_¬.

Today my laptop suddenly just went blank in mid-use. The screen just turned off and the hard disk drive light wasn't flashing. I assumed it was some sort of funky crash, and thought to myself "Ah, this brings me back to classic late 90s computer crashing problems!"

When my nostalgia wore off I hit the power button, only to be greeted by the black screen once more! Then once again. Then the third time the power lights + control panel lights flashed and then it turned itself off.

Alas, this frustrates me ever so. The laptop is still under manufacturer's warranty, so if it's a hardware problem it's best for me to send it off to them for repairs and not try any myself.

I'm really just asking for a bit of advice. I've heard of similar problems on laptops being resolved by flashing the bios with the latest firmware.

I have a USB Memory Stick prep'd to do this with the latest bios firmware, and when I use the startup key combination for the laptop to begin an update from a memory stick (Ctrl+Esc + Power Button) the power light flashes a few time to let me know that it's ready to receive an update.

However, if this doesn't fix the problem I would obviously hate the manufacturer to turn around and say I've been messing with the bios and that may have caused the problem.

Tomorrow I'm going to phone the tech support line to see if they will advise me to flash the bios.

Has anyone had a problem like this before? Do you think flashing the bios will help?

My laptop is an ACER AS6930G-744G32.

if it under warranty then i wouldn't mess with the bios (or anything else) in case anything goes wrong. just send it back & get it fixed

Don't do the BIOS flash. What guarantees you it won't crash again in the middle of the BIOS update and make things worse? Can you even see something on the screen when you're in the BIOS update utility?

It doesn't likely a BIOS update will fix it anyway. It was working fine before, right? No recent hardware changes?

It sounds more like a hardware issue. Try re-seating the RAM and any other add-in cards if you can get to those without breaking any warranty seals. If that doesn't help, use your warranty.