Problems with Acer display. Occasionally won't turn on, randomly changes resolution to impossibly low settings, etc.

[acerproblems8446]

Hello all,


I am having some problems with my Acer laptop. It is model SF315-51G-51CE and is relatively new (released in 2017, purchased in fall 2017, so it is turning 2 years now). It is running windows 10 OS build 17134.1006


The problem: It started months ago, occasionally if I closed the laptop and opened it would not turn on. The laptop would wake up, the light would go from orange to blue, but it would never turn the screen on, at least for the 10-20 seconds that I would wait for and then hard shutdown it.


Later, this progressed into the same problem got worst. It sometimes would turn on, but completely black pixels. Or it would oscillate between black pixels and off. This would happen maybe once or twice a week.

Now it has reached a point where I can't do my work or studies properly. It has around a 50% chance of the screen not turning on. Same symptoms, it is either black pixels, or not on at all. Usually a hard reset would fix it but now I need to hard reset it 1-20 times! Occasionally it will even go into system recovery mode, and once it tried to fix the C drive! I don't want to kill my laptop by constantly hard resetting it dozens of times a day.

Another quirk is that very rarely, it has happened 3-4 times, it will change the resolution. It goes down to 640/480, which isn't even listed in the options when I open them!

Something that may be relevant: In the spring of this year, I decided to disable windows updates as I found them too frequent and impeding my work. This problem started far later than when I stopped updating it. I will go into why I decided to re enable updates and have brought my system back upto date will all the updates in the next part.


What I have tried: My first reaction was to update the drivers. I tried, and device manager said no updates were available and that I should try windows update. So I did. a whole years of updates later, the problem was still there. I tried updating the drivers again, and this time it did actually find something to install, but there was a problem during installation. I manually found a driver online from acer and installed that, and that is what I have now. It still didn't fix the problem. So after that, I pretty much have no idea how to fix it.


Any ideas or suggestions would be highly appreciated. On a side note, I don't think the issue is hardware, because I tried plugging in a second display when the display was having problems again, and the new display also didn't work.


Currently I have all drivers for the display uninstalled, it's running on basic windows drivers and I see literally no difference.

 

[Regedit32]

If you are running Microsoft's basic video driver, and the issue persists then that to me suggests there may be a hardware issue going on.

Have you made sure the cooling system for your computer is working and is itself clean?

Years ago, I learnt the hard way what happens when you don't keep vents clean. The overheating damaged my graphics chip to the point I had to replace the entire motherboard.

It may be a software issue too - so I do not completely rule that out.

Is there any particular reason you are running a very old build of Windows 10? Have you attempted to update the OS at all?

Microsoft and various computer manufacturers are constantly working on bugs to keep things working for the end user. Perhaps, if you got the latest Windows 10 build installed, you may find some major improvements. Just be warned though, that this may mean you'd need to go to the manufacturer site and obtain updates for your network drivers, and in your case a graphics driver too.

 

[acerproblems8446]

If you are running Microsoft's basic video driver, and the issue persists then that to me suggests there may be a hardware issue going on.

Have you made sure the cooling system for your computer is working and is itself clean?

Years ago, I learnt the hard way what happens when you don't keep vents clean. The overheating damaged my graphics chip to the point I had to replace the entire motherboard.

It may be a software issue too - so I do not completely rule that out.

Is there any particular reason you are running a very old build of Windows 10? Have you attempted to update the OS at all?

Microsoft and various computer manufacturers are constantly working on bugs to keep things working for the end user. Perhaps, if you got the latest Windows 10 build installed, you may find some major improvements. Just be warned though, that this may mean you'd need to go to the manufacturer site and obtain updates for your network drivers, and in your case a graphics driver too.

No I haven't cleaned it, its a relatively new laptop, but the heating issue *is* a thing. Very rarely I have used it in hot environments so it has occasionally heated up a lot, and it does have an aluminium frame so that may have been the reason for the hardware damage.


And yes I have updated it fully now and it still persists.


Acer has not really even updated the drivers since the laptop came out, so I'm honestly starting to think it may be the hardware too.


The only thing that doesn't make sense is that it works completely 100% fine when it's already on, and simply restarting it fixes the problem! That's why I'm trying to fix up the software.