KAV60/D250 no power and ticking sound inside

Hello! New to the forum here and wrestling with a problem I can't seem to figure out.

I've had an Aspire ONE KAV60/A250 come in simply with a loose internal power jack and not powering up. Repaired that and replaced the power adapter, but it will not boot at all ( black screen, no power button light, no fan ). It is obviously getting power though.

So far, I have replaced the, power adapter, power block and the motherboard, and still nothing. There is a ticking sound in 1 second intervals coming from the motherboard when I plug the power adapter in, and when I've tried to do a BIOS update ( Fn+Esc ) the power LED blinks in synch with the ticking sound I hear. I tried flashing the BIOS with a flash drive by holding down Fn+Esc, pressing the power button, and releasing all buttons, but nothing happens. The ticking sound was present on the old motherboard as well. This is without the hard drive or the battery installed by by the way, HD tested fine and has no issues.

Any info or advice would be most appreciated, as I'm really stumped on this one. I've changed out close to 100 laptop and desktop motherboards in 12 years as a tech, and never been stumped like this. Thank you in advance for your time!

 

Believe it or not, you've just told the exact story of how my first (pearl white) AAO died. I can't remember the model number though. Mine was about a year old, just out of warranty but had the exact same symptoms.

Sorry to say, I just called it quits and had to buy a new model. But, if you're getting the same ticking sound with two different motherboards I would say that either your replacement motherboard is also faulty, or maybe an inverter in the LCD panel has gone bung? I don't know about the last one as I don't know if it's an LED backlit screen or not

P.S Mine was pearl white, 8.9" screen IDE hdd (not sata), had a maximum of 1.5gb RAM and no bluetooth.

 

The clicking sound means that you have a missed connection on your motherboard. I would recheck all your work on the board. I had the same problem when I soldered a mini-pci connector to my board. I had two of the leads touching on the connector, it was a lot of hard work to find, but I did it.

 

Clean all your work with some type of solvent. I used acetone and that did the trick.

 

Thanks for the reply..it's very possible I did get a bad replacement motherboard. Not sure about the inverter, haven't plugged it into an external monitor yet.

When I was troubleshooting it at first with the original motherboard in, it did boot for about 2 seconds to the ACER screen, and then went black. In my experience the inverters go out gradually, but anything's possible.

 

I checked both boards very thoroughly with a strong mag glass and could not see anything amiss on either board. No burned components, nothing out of the ordinary. No bad solder joints, and nothing touching anything it shouldn't, as far as I can see. I didn't do any soldering on the boards either. Quite a puzzle. Guess the next step will be cleaning the connections thoroughly.



Thanks for your reply, appreciate it

 

Hummm....the LCD would not effect the board in that way. I would say "no" to that idea. If an inverter is going bad it's not going to be a binary event. You can try unplugging the LCD from the board and plugging the hard drive in to see if it is reading. You can tell if the hard drive led is blinking. My bet is that there is something on the board causing a short still. You can also try swapping the memory out.

 

I'd bet about a short of some kind too, just can't seem to locate it on either board! I swapped out the RAM with a few known good sticks, no change. disconnected the LCD connector and no change. Installed the hard drive (tested, works fine ) and no change. New power board, no change. swapped the new board and the old board, doing same as above, no change.

 

I originally thought it might have been a short circuit in mine too, however I'd never opened it, let alone modded it. For me, sadly it was just the end of my machine.

 

That is really strange that two motherboards are doing the same things....are you plugging in the keyboard when you are testing both boards? What are the items that are being shared when you are testing both motherboard? Are you using those items when you are going the testing like same ram, same drive? What about using a different sound board? I'm thinking the short in located on the sound board if you are using the same sound board.