D250 White screen & Momentary Flashes of what belongs

I have a D250 with Windows XP Home that I have been working on for some time. When I turn it on, I get a quick flash of the Acer logo, and then moments later in the boot, I see a quick flash of the login in screen then back to white glow. The white glow is , not desktop icons, nothing at all but a white glow. I plug in the external video, and everything on it shows up fine. I change settings in the display properties and I get a flash of windows or whatever should be on the screen at that moment of time. I have uninstalled drivers, reinstalled, changed settings, tried everything I can think of and everything I can find on the net to get this fixed and nothing has worked. Does anyone here have any suggestions?

 

It could be a faulty LCD cable inside the AAO. I know mine only lasted a year or so before I had to repair it, then eventually replace it. If you tilt the screen to random positions does it flicker or change anything on the screen?

 

I have been working on this machine with my father, who is in another state. I leave tomorrow morning to head out there for Thanksgiving, and I am taking a spare AAO with me, so I hope to figure it out one way or another. He says that it does not change how the screen looks when he moves it, but somethings like the screen saver works on it when it kicks on. I have done all sorts of things to this thing with no forward progress, thus the reason why I posted to this forum. I missed the notification in my email until just now, so as soon as I know more, I will post it here. Hopefully it helps someone else in the long run...

 

Ok....So I am here working on the netbook, and the placement of the screen doesn't make a difference on the way the screen appears. I swapped the hard drive into another machine, and it boots as it should, completely normal. Using the hard drive from the spare machine, it still flickers and and does as I describe. I then tore it apart to see what is happening, and it appears that the fan that is mounted on the left(I assume the GPU fan) is not working. It spins up, and runs for maybe 10 seconds and then shuts off. All the flickering seems to happen before the fan shuts off, so I again am assuming that the problem is the GPU fan. Is there a way to get the GPU fan to stay on so I can test this theory without tearing apart the spare machine?

 

That fan is primarily to cool the CPU and it is controlled by the BIOS (and later by Windows) to turn on and off depending on temperature of the CPU. It's function is also goverened by the load on the machine, kind of like AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet technology.

The heatsync should actually touch on multiple chips, the CPU and GPU are the main ones.

The logic behind your theory could only point to one of two things. Either 1. The CPU or GPU are warming up and (just like the Xbox 360, the two chips being Ball Grid Array) are delaminating from the motherboard, however this would mean worse problems than what you're having, so its very, very unlikely. or 2. the CPU or GPU are over heating. In whic case you could test this by disassembling the netbook, running it, but using another extenal fan to keep the circuitry cool.

The most likely suspect is either the cable, or the LCD panel itself.

 

So after getting back to Montana with the netbook, I started tearing into the area around the screen to see if messing with any of the wiring helps...and it turns out that the connection on the back of the LCD has what appears to me to be frayed wires under the tape securing it on. I messed with the worst looking one and rebooted the computer and the screen has been functional ever since. Guess its replacement LCD cable time. On a side note, this machine has directx issues. I can not for the life of me get it to install directx 9.0c. It seems stuck on 9.0b, and that was quite the hassle to get it to. Is 9.0b the best I can do with this particular netbook? Thanks for the help thus far, I really do appreciate it.

 

Glad to hear you got the LCD going, the cables that come built into the AAO's mustn't be that good, I've had to replace mine as well.

As for DirectX, I can't see any reason why it would be difficult to install, short of corruption in the operating system. Visit the microsoft download site and grab the latest dx9 installer and try that.

 

I tried every possible way of installing the DirectX, from web installer to full install, nothing worked. Finally did a repair install of XP and reinstalled the service packs and now I am currently working on service pack 3. Are the wires under the tape supposed to look frayed? Cause I haven't had to mess with it again since, it has been running good, so I am unsure if I should go ahead and replace the cable or not. I am afraid I am going to give this back to my sister(who is attending college)and it will have issues again, but if the cable is ok now, I would hate to waste her money...Thanks for all your responses, I really do appreciate the help.

 

From memory my original cable didn't look "frayed" however there were several loose connections and the main earth wire was just bound together and taped. If it was done properly, it should have been bound, soldered and had heat-shrink over it, of course the right thing to do would not have been to put a join there in the first place.

The wires themselves were quite delicate. I would suggest replacing the cable anyway. Prevention is better than cure, and for a part that is continuously twisted and contorted through normal use of the netbook, a repair can be easily broken. A new cable is (in my opinion) the best option, even if it does cost some cash. Haven't had a single problem with mine since the replacement.

 

This is exactly the problem I have. How do I go about fixing it? Should I just take it in to a tech and have them do it, tell them the problem? I've taken apart desktops, but am wary of taking apart my laptop.