Black screen AFTER startup

Hi all

Our Aspire One has recently started to show a black screen, but this doesn't seem to be the relatively common issue that can be resolved by flashing the BIOS.

Detailed description:
When I press the power button, the computer starts to boot. After a few seconds, the screen goes black, the power led is still on, but nothing else happens - no hard drive activity, mouse still has power, whatever I do (press keys etc.) doesn't lead to anything. In some instances, the screen goes black after 5 seconds or so (when the computer is still in "DOS" mode during the startup), whereas sometimes it actually starts up to the Windows desktop and I can start using it, but it never lasts longer than about 10 seconds after the Windows desktop appears.
The first instances occurred a few months ago at random times when using the computer, i.e. it could happen when the computer had been on for 2 hours or so. We had the impression that it only happened when it ran on battery.
Over the last few weeks, this became more and more frequent and started occurring while the computer was not running on battery, up to the current situation where it happens every single time we turn it on.
I tried flashing the BIOS, but that didn't work. Pressing Fn and Esc didn't make it start the BIOS flashing procedure, however it seems that as long as I press it, the computer is in an endless startup loop (restarting every 5 seconds or so) and the screen doesn't go black.

Computer:
It's an AA1 D150, 2 years old. It came with WinXP, but we installed Win7 a few months ago. The problem first started occurring about 3 to 4 months after we installed Win7. Other than that, no changes to the original settings, we never dropped it etc.

Any ideas...? Thanks so much for your help!

 

Have you tried an external monitor? Sounds like it's either a bad LED screen or a bad GPU.