My mom moved out of state a couple days ago, leaving behind a bunch of crap for me to sort through. And of course, one thing she left behind was an Acer laptop that used to belong to me back in 2009. It was an Aspire, running Windows Vista. Laptop was in okay condition. It was capable of charging when I hooked it up. Battery looked fine. Upon start-up, the Acer logo would pop up. But once that loaded, I would be directed to a black screen with a flashing line cursor- as if it wanted me to type additional information. I can't get it to progress past that black screen. I've brought up the maintence menu in order to restore it to factory settings (I have no files I want to keep), but I can't find an option to restore it to factory. What do I do?
Are you able to boot from a Windows or Linux USB/CD? If so, the problem is that the hard drive needs to be replaced. If that doesn't work, I believe your BIOS is gone, and the computer would need to be sent to a repair store, or you would need to simply purchase a new computer.
Looking into that. If hard drive needs to be replaced, probably will just give laptop away for parts. Hard drive is a little too expensive to repair right now. I did. All I got was a strange beeping noise whenever I pressed it. Nothing else happened, though I tried holding it down. On another occasion, I pressed both repeatedly when the Acer logo appeared. Unfortunately, I don't have either. The replacement disk I had for the laptop is gone. I mean, it's not imperative I repair this laptop. This laptop actually sat in storage for a few years and I ended up getting a new laptop anyway. Well, so I'm guessing the best thing to do would be to make it a paperweight or see if someone wants to use it for parts.
It might also be a problem with the screen or the computer chip behind the screen, can you tell me what model it is?