Dead acer a150

Hi, new to the site so if ive posted in the wrong place forgive me, ive also searched and cant find a similar post about my problem,
I baught an acer aspire a150 of amazon, it was used but like new and was very happy when i recieved it, worked perfectly it is the 500mb memory 120 gb hdd model with linux, i installed xp using the very good guides on this site, and has worked perfectly for a week, i switched on this morning, the green power light comes on, faint whirring and whinning from computer, sounds normal but screen remains blank, there is no hdd light and doesnt boot,doesnt even go to bios, ive tried unplugging battery, using ac power only, ive even prayed to the gods of acer and offered my hamster as sacrifice(only joking about the hamster)
Im just wondering if this is a common fault and if there is an easy fix, if not im wondering where i stand with the warrenty, installing xp shouldnt be a problem should it? and how do i go about getting warrenty?, is it sellers responsibility? (it was second hand). i paid 170 pounds for it wich was silly because ive just found a brand new one, same model for 189.99 on play. would really appreciate any advice, i really dont know what il do without it now, makes life so much easier on the move.
Thanks,
Matt.

 

Reflash the BIOS, is the first response.

 

Same thing happened to mine, it seems to be a common fault with the aao. USB BIOS flash fixed it:

http://chromick.com/eric/aa1/aspire-one ... -of-death/

 

That article is somewhat misleading, a bricked Aspire One that needs to use the BIOS recovery procedure will not actually boot from a USB drive (it only looks for a valid BIOS image file named "ZG5IA32.FD" on a FAT-formatted USB storage device). The "unetbootin" step is therefore unnecessary.

The original BIOS recovery article on macles blog provides a better explanation of the emergency procedure.

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/acer ... overy.html

A FreeDOS bootable USB stick is useful if you want to perform a BIOS upgrade on a working system though.

 

FYI: I had OP's identical problem. Macles' "bios flash" wasn't the cure for many of us. Mine got sent back, and eventually had the motherboard replaced by Acer (after no shenanigans on my part!).

Clearly a hardware problem with these Acers...

 

Fair comment. There are a multitude of reasons why a laptop would fail to POST and just show a black screen. Without some kind of POST diagnostics device it's almost impossible to determine the exact cause. It would seem that that the AA1 is prone to BIOS corruption and for many the BIOS recovery procedure is a cheap and easy solution.

It does sound in this case though that the OP's AA1 is beyond BIOS recovery and has a more fundamental hardware failure.