Bizarre Laptop Boot Problem

tjubert

Distinguished
Apr 2, 2010
2
0
18,510
Hi all,

About 3 months ago I poured water all over my Acer Aspire 5920. I immediately removed all componants and left to dry for a couple of weeks.

Now, the laptop only boots once per day! It's the strangest thing.

I have no battery installed, and when I plug the power cable in the blue light indicating there's power comes on on the laptop. However, hitting the power button does absolutely nothing. No whirring, no additional LEDs, nothing at all. Wait 24 hours and bingo, it boots no problem.

I tried a few days ago going into recovery console and restoring factory settings. Weirdly this resulted in the laptop working just fine for a few days, before returning to its old self. When it does boot it seems to be running a bit slow.

This is really confusing me, because I'd assume - due to the water - it was a hardware issue; yet the fact the factory settings restore helped temporarily seems to indicate software issues. Or a combination of both?! It's frustrating because the thing clearly works, it's just being stubborn.

Any help / ideas hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance guys!

Tom
 
It sounds to me like it is a hardware issue. When water is involved with electrical components, you can get strange results like this, i.e. sometimes it will work, sometimes it will not. Chances are that there is an issue with the power switch or it could be an issue with any number of components. Narrowing it down is rather hard.
 

tjubert

Distinguished
Apr 2, 2010
2
0
18,510
I know what you mean. What bothers me is just that it's so consistant. If it was turning on intermittantly, fair enough, but something in there somewhere is telling it to only switch on once per day.

One thing I considered - do laptops have inbuilt safety mechanisms for water spills? I'd spilt water on it once before and it instantly turned off, and wouldn't switch back on for 24 hours - was that a design feature? If so, is it possible it's now malfunctioning?

Switched lapppy on today and got the following error message, after which it refused to fully boot.

lappyerror.jpg