I have an Acer Aspire 3680 and all i get is a black screen when i power up. it seems to get power, but nothing appears on the screen when you boot up. is it the graphics card or could it be a bigger issue? any ideas?

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I have the same problem with my acer laptop 3680. It is stuck on the BIOS screen with "press f2" at the bottom. I can get into the menu by pressing f2 repeatedly as soon as I hit the power button, and was able to change the boot order to CD first, but it will not boot from the Windows CD even though the CD drive is flashing and I can hear the CD spinning - same as the hard drive - still get the BIOS screen. I took it completely apart, dusted with compressed air, replaced RAM (new), and still same f2 screen. I removed the hard drive and booted up and the BIOS screen did not appear, but it said "Drive not found". Therefore, I think I have a dead BIOS battery since the BIOS isn't present without the HD. I did not notice a battery when I had it apart and have read that it is soldered in and almost impossible to replace. I ordered another motherboard on eBay (search: motherboard 3680) for $89 BIN today and will post again with results hopefully next week.
Have you tried pressing ALT+F10 on boot? If lucky, that will get the recovery console and you'll lose all data. I was able to save everything from my HD by plugging it into my PC with a USB/IDE adaptor which can be bought for cheap online and in most computer stores.

Do you hear any sounds?,.. see any LED lights? Do you see any way to know there is power to the laptop? Please provide more details so that you can get an answer that is somewhat accurate. \015\012
\015\012without any more information to go on,.. the problem could be motherboard, backlight, backlight inverter, power supply, dc power jack (in the laptop),.... and that is just the short list,.. Please provide more details to get a better answer