Acer Extensa 5420 won't boot up

Hi, I have an Acer Extensa 5420-5687 laptop (1.6 GHz) it originally came with Vista but is now on Win XP professional version 2002 SP3.

Yesterday it did not bootup, the screen did not light up, but the little green light did, lighthing up once (2 seconds) along with the fan and the DVDrom, it does this 3 times then it turns off. I did some cleaning (fan and all), never worked. I did the press-for-30 seconds-no-power-supply-and-turn-on-with-the-adapter never worked. Now I did the Alt+f10 thing, and finally it worked. I had no problem turning it on yesterday, probably 3 times, it went straight. I was looking to ask about this in this site yesterday but i still had to wait because i got deactivated. the PC clock is OK, not late or anything.

So, this morning I had to go through the same process again, this time the alt+f10 never worked. now i did the ctrl+alt+del and it worked. another point, for some reason it booted up (same as yesterday) when the mouse was disconnected(usb) not immediately though, takes time.

This is a 'hand me down' so I was not the one who installed the XP, I still have to ask my sister how it went.

Please I need some advice, is there anyway i could prevent this from happening again?

 

I'd run the hard drive manufacturer's hard drive diagnostics. If you see errors there, the hard drive is failing and needs to be replaced.

To run the diags, download and burn the Ultimate Boot CD to CD. It has all the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utilities, (plus much more). Simply boot your computer from this CD and select the utility you want to run.

If you aren't sure who made the hard drive in your computer, use Seagate's Seatools as it will work with most any make of drive.

The following instructions may prove helpful for burning the UBCD .iso file to disc:
How can I write (burn) ISO files to CD or DVD?

 

Thanks I'll try this. Oh I forgot to tell you laptop was not working when I posted the first post. it has not booted up the past few days. or maybe you got that already?so from what i'm geting this Ultimate boot cd will be able to boot up the laptop or maybe just go through the BIOS?or not?

 

Yes, the UBCD is bootable.

If the computer doesn't boot from it, make sure that the CMOS/BIOS Setup is set to try and boot from the CD/DVD drive BEFORE trying to boot from the hard drive.

 

i made a bootable cd not sure though if i got it right. it does not seem to appear in windows explorer when i checked and the does not boot the laptop. how do i do it right?how do i know if i did a good a burn? i'm using nero 10

 

In your laptop's CMOS/BIOS Setup, it is setup to try and boot from the CD/DVD drive before the hard drive?

Have you tried booting another computer with your UBCD?