I have had my Acer Aspire 5515 for almost three years; it has never given me major issues or had problems in the past. About a month ago it was having trouble coming out of hibernate mode; I thought it was the hibernate file being too large but even when it was deleted the problem persisted.
My Acer is not the newest on the market but it has been a true workhorse. When the screen started to get extremely dark I thought it was toast; I had three choices. Take it to get repaired, try to figure out what was wrong with it or dig in and buy a new laptop. I opted to try to fix it myself and had to restart it each time the screen would come out of sleep mode and be dark.
There is a difference between having a dead screen and a dark screen. A dead screen shows absolutely nothing but a dark screen allows you to see some of the screen but it is too dark to maneuver the mouse or operate it properly. When I rebooted in safe mode then restarted I had no screen problems; I did a system restore to an earlier date thinking that something crept into my computer. That was not a fix.
I started reading online about similar problems; since I had deleted the hibernate file I no longer had the option to put the computer into that mode so ‘sleep’ was my only option. If you try to delete the hibernate file but want to restore it you will have to run your DOS prompt in administrator mode. Here is what you need to type in when you have started DOS with administrator power:
At the command prompt:
powercfg h on (to turn it back on)
powercfg h off (to turn it off)
One of the easiest fixes for the Acer dark screen or black screen takes only a couple of minutes to complete. Unplug the laptop and then remove the battery. When you have done that open the laptop back up and press and hold the power button for two minutes. When I tried this the first time I was rushing it and didn’t give it enough time to work properly. I had to do this again a couple of days ago and followed the above steps but held down the power button for about four minutes then left the battery out for about an hour. When I put the battery back in and started it up everything worked perfectly.
If you start up and the screen is completely black or extremely dark and you do not see the Acer logo or anything loading then you might have a true screen problem. Mine is only when coming out of hibernate or sleep mode so far. I have had a couple of computer techs look at it and they say that the BIOS is fine and they can’t technically find a problem with the laptop. They did see the screen darkness and how I used the F6 key to try to restore the screen but that will only work for a couple weeks and each time you do it you will have to click it more and more.
One of the best pieces of advice for this Acer issue is to back up your information regularly. If something happens to your laptop and you have to pay someone to retrieve it you will feel like kicking yourself. I am at a crossroads, I am glad that I still have my trusty 5515 working hard for me but I would really like to know why the extremely dark screen occurs. If it was indeed the screen then I wouldn’t see anything upon start up and wouldn’t be able to use the F6 button to coax it back to normal view.
The drivers were a possible issue but both of the techs checked them as well as updates from the Acer site and everything was properly updated. It is widespread enough that Acer has to know about this; why they haven’t addressed it or at least provided some basic information about it makes me second guess buying another laptop from them in the near future.
