Hi all,
I'm looking at my mum's Acer Aspire 5520 laptop with Kubuntu installed that seems to have strange shutdown problems.
I can power the laptop on, but at random times (where t is generally < 2 minutes, sometimes up to 10mins, sometimes as little as 5sec) the laptop will power down completely with no user intervention. I've seen this happen while in the Grub boot menu, while Linux KDM login screen is displayed, while it's booting Linux, while it's running memtest and even while in the BIOS setup screens. This happens on the battery only, mains only and on battery and mains power combinations.
At other times, it seems the laptop goes into some kind of sleep state where the hard drive, power button LED and power state LED flash at the same time (approx 1s on, 1s off but I've not measured this), and while in this 'state' pressing space bar 3 times toggles the wifi LED so that it flashes in the same manner as the power and HDD LEDs.
When Linux does actually boot (rare given the quick power off), it appears to function ok, other than when powering off or restarting, the laptop is not actually powered down, and I can still switch virtual terminals but I cannot type anything in the getty (or whatever ubuntu uses) login processes.
Some google results suggest the motherboard needs to be reflowed, and people suggest putting the laptop motherboard into an oven at 200 degrees C for 5 -7 minutes!! :(
The CPU fan does come on and spins a lot in the grub menu (when the cpu should not be busy): I cannot tell if the CPU fan exhaust is hotter than normal, but this suggests that perhaps there's an overheating problem and some sort of thermal cut-out is powering down the laptop. I cannot see any abnormal amount of dust in any of the cooling vents, and there's no unusual rattling of the fan.
Any suggestions please?
Thanks, Srdjan