help

[johnnie99]

i have a acer aspire 9810 my problem is my screen only works when it wants to . it could work for a day ore a hour then slowly fade out it could be out a week or weekies and pop back in again

[fourplay]

Your LCD is fucked i guess, try to take it to the service center.

[jbravo17]

Actually ... it very well could be the LCD, but that doesn't rule out a number of other possibilities as well. I fix a large number of notebooks, and it's usually something or other to do with a screen that brings a notebook into my shop.

Basically, you could have a flaky LCD, you could have a failing inverter, you could have a bad video cable, or you could have a problem with your backlight. Unfortunately, if your notebook is the one I'm thinking of (20" gaming machine, nVIDIA video, circa 2006 or thereabouts?) then you could also be an unfortunate victim of nVIDIA's crop of faulty GPU's from the period. This affected MANY brands of notebooks, though you most often hear about it from owners of IBM Thinkpads (presumably because the rest of the machine is made so well, that they're more likely to keep the machine long enough to experience problems).

The bad news ... if it's the LCD, it's bound to be expensive. There just weren't many 20" notebooks manufactured to where 20" LCD's are floating around on the open market at reasonable prices. If your machine used a standard 14", 15" or 17" display, quality panels would readily be available wholesale very cheaply ... and that's a good thing because most notebooks in those sizes wouldn't be worth fixing otherwise. A quick scan of eBay (and I'm not advocating you go this route, just using it to illustrate a point) shows only one 20.1" display for sale for the Acer 9810. And it's fairly pricey as eBay display panels go (just a tad under $200). If that's comparable to the wholesale price of a quality replacement panel, then the cost of the total repair is going to climb up there pretty quickly.

The worse news ... if it's the GPU, you're probably screwed. You can't change the GPU without replacing the motherboard, and obtaining a guaranteed motherboard from 2006 with an nVIDIA GPU is nigh impossible. I wouldn't trust anyone who said they had one!
In fact, several manufacturers very quietly recalled their nVIDIA GPU based units from this period. But I don't know of any of those programs that haven't expired at this point.

But there is a silver lining ... if it's anything else, the part is readily available and relatively inexpensive. And based on your limited description (and not seeing it firsthand) I think there's at least a chance that it's a backlight, inverter or cable. Any quality repair shop that's not out to rip you off should be able to make that determination for you.

Good luck to you.

--JB

[johnnie99]

my screen is always lite up but no image but if i connect a monotor up to it theres no
problem with the monotor .i tested the screen cables and they are good .my screen size is a 20 in

[RemunRemun]

What you say sounds strangely familiar to me. I got an Acer Aspire 7730G, it also has screen issues. Sometimes I have weeks that my screen is fading from light to black (but usually still bright enough to work) but then all of the sudden it goes completely black....the processes are all still running perfectly but I can't see shit.
The only way to 'fix' it for me is to either reboot the laptop or put it into standby and take it out of standby. But if I do this, I might go black again 2 minutes later or 2 hours later...
Then, with no obvious reason, the problem doesn't occur for weeks or even months (last time I had it now was about 3 weeks ago).
But it's not my only hardware problem with Acer....have a sound issue from the beginning as well.
Seriously, first and last time I buy an Acer product...

[jbravo17]

Johnnie99:

That's good news for you ... pretty much rules out GPU. A bad GPU would cause problems with the external monitor as well.

Monitor lit, but no image is usually video cable (and by this I mean the internal video cable that runs from the laptop mainboard to the LCD panel) ... but could still also be the inverter, and if it's either of those it makes sense that it's intermittent if the part is flaky and not yet altogether bad.

It's definitely worth having it checked. Replacing either or both of those should be far less expensive than buying an LCD panel.

RemunRemun:

Not sure what the official policy is here, but it's generally not a good idea to "piggyback" off of someone else's thread. One good reason is that it makes a forum harder to search.

Please don't take any offense. It's not my place and I'm not trying to be the forum police. For all I know you were just making a comment, and that's cool.

But if you're looking for help (which I'd be more than happy to give) you should probably start a new topic. That's the only reason I didn't say anything about your specific situation here.

--JB

[RemunRemun]

I'm no stranger to forums, but I have no idea what you are talking about mate.
He has a laptop screen issue with Acer, I have a laptop screen issue with Acer. Not sure how I could be a nuissance, just saying johnnie99 is not the only one with this kind of problem.