Occasional black screen of death?

I have an Acer Aspire 5552G and recently it's fallen into the annoying habit of not booting at all. In other words, black screen of death. It powers up fine, I can hear both the fan and the CD drive working, but nothing else. It never gets to the BIOS, and in fact the display never comes on (the screen remains black, as opposed to grey). The reason I know it's not a display issue is that the hard drive quick key never blinks, goes on... nothing.

Here's the odd thing: It doesn't always do this. I'm using it to post this right now, and how I managed to turn it on, I have no idea. I would say that about 2/3 of the time it doesn't boot, and the remainder, everything is perfectly fine. It just seems to work whenever it feels like it.

Another thing is, I did try updating the BIOS. I installed the latest version from Acer's site and ran the .exe . That gave me kind of a weird result--when I left the room and came back a few minutes later, I found it in the same state as when it doesn't boot (lights on, fan working, no display or hard drive activity). I just assumed that the installation had finished and it had restarted the computer, and obviously not fixed the issue, so I held down the power button and turned it off. When I turned it back on, however, it worked. Thinking that it did solve the problem, I went on with my business, and turned it off when I went to bed last night (I've been leaving it on because of all this). But guess what? It didn't work this morning. I turned it on and off for about 15 minutes before it finally worked.

I realise that you can also do it through a flash drive as you turn it on, but I figured I would do it the way so I don't have to turn it off. Should I try the flash drive method, even though I already (apparently) installed it? (I checked

This is really confusing me. I've been googling variants of "laptop occasional black screen of death" all of today and yesterday and nothing I've found tells me anything I don't know/haven't tried (update the BIOS, connect to another monitor to check the display, etc...) or even sounds exactly like what my problem it.

Does anybody have any idea what's going on here? I don't even know if this is a hardware or software issue. (Because of this, I wasn't sure where to post this; Mods, feel free to move it if you think it goes elsewhere.) Thanks a million in advance to anyone who can help, and apologies for the wall of text!

 

Have you tried completely cleaning it out? That's what I had to do with my old laptop, and it started working fine after that until the screen got broken.

 

Have you tried a factory reset when you manage to access your computer, or running in safe mode?
It might just be a case of parts overheating and the computer shuts itself off to prevent any damages being made to it, like Linda said, try cleaning the computer out, there will be tutorials specific to that model on how to disassemble for cleaning, if that fails, try a factory reset and hopefully that might fix it. Good luck.

 

Do you leave your laptop plugged in most of the time? I'm wondering if your battery and/or power supply have gotten damaged. I've heard that it's not good to leave your battery plugged in constantly charging. I had a similar issue with one of my laptops and discovered a small crack in the battery case that was causing the removable battery to not be firmly attached to the rest of the laptop - as soon as I attached my spare battery it started working fine again. Prior to that, it was hit or miss if the computer would stay on or boot up if I didn't have it plugged in.

Given your description, it sounds like some kind of hardware issue - a software or BIOS issue would happen more consistently I would imagine.