Acer laptop won't turn on? Try the battery reset pinhole first
A simple check brings many 'dead' Acer laptops back to life. Here is what to try, in order, before booking a repair.
You press the power button on your Acer laptop and nothing happens: no lights, no fan, no screen. It's an alarming moment, but on Acer laptops in particular there is a simple check that brings a surprising number of "dead" machines back to life, and it takes less than a minute. Here is what to try, in order, before you book a repair.
1. Check the charger and the charging light
Start with the obvious, because it is often the answer. Plug the charger into a wall socket you know works (not an extension lead), and check both ends of the cable are pushed fully home. Many Acer laptops have a small battery or power indicator near the charging port or on the front edge. If it doesn't light at all with the charger connected, the problem could be the charger, the cable or the charging port. If you have another Acer charger of the same type and wattage, try it. Leave the laptop charging for at least 30 minutes before deciding it's dead: a completely flat battery may not respond straight away.
2. Use the battery reset pinhole
Most recent Acer laptops, including many Aspire, Swift, Spin, Nitro and TravelMate models, have a sealed battery that you can't remove. Instead, Acer puts a tiny pinhole on the underside of the laptop, usually marked with a small battery symbol. Pressing the button inside it disconnects the battery for a moment, which clears the power-management state that can leave a laptop refusing to start.
- Unplug the charger.
- Turn the laptop over and find the pinhole with the battery symbol. (Don't confuse it with a microphone hole or a speaker grille.)
- Straighten a paper clip, push it gently into the hole until you feel a click, and hold it there for about four seconds.
- Reconnect the charger and press the power button.
If the laptop starts, the problem was almost certainly a "stuck" power state, often after a flat battery, a Windows update or a long time in a drawer. It's worth letting it charge fully and restarting normally once or twice.
3. Do a hard reset
If your model has no pinhole, or it made no difference, unplug the charger and hold the power button down for 30 seconds, then reconnect the charger and try again. This drains residual power and has a similar effect on many laptops.
4. Is it really off, or is the screen just black?
Look carefully for signs of life: a power light, the Caps Lock light responding when you press the key, a fan running or a keyboard backlight. If any of these work, the laptop may be on with a blank screen rather than dead. Try:
- Turning the screen brightness up with the brightness keys.
- Connecting an external monitor or TV with an HDMI cable. If a picture appears there, the laptop is working and the fault is in its own screen or screen cable.
- Pressing the Windows key, Ctrl, Shift and B together, which restarts the graphics driver in Windows.
5. Think about what happened before
What happened just before the laptop stopped working often tells you most about the cause:
- A drink or spill, even a small one days earlier: don't keep trying to switch it on. Liquid causes corrosion on the motherboard, and powering it up can make the damage worse.
- The charger had been loose or needed wiggling for a while: the charging port or the board around it may have failed. That's a power jack repair, not a new laptop.
- The battery had been lasting less and less, or the case is bulging or the touchpad has started lifting: the battery may have failed or swollen. A swollen battery should be replaced promptly and not charged further. See laptop battery replacement.
- It was dropped: internal connectors can come loose or the board can crack.
When to stop and get it looked at
If the charger is known to be good, the pinhole reset and hard reset have done nothing, and there's still no sign of life, the fault is inside: usually the charging circuit, the battery or the motherboard. These are all things we repair on Acer laptops. Your files are normally safe on the drive even when the laptop itself won't start, and they can be copied off before any repair if you need them.
Read more about our Acer laptop and PC repairs, or call Home Computer Repairs on 020 8658 4366. You can also ask for a free estimate: tell us the model (it's on the label underneath) and what happened before it stopped working.