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I recently inherited an Acer Aspire M1100, running Vista Home Premium. I did the usual clean up, clean disk, registry, defrag etc etc. And was running ok did speed up. Then beginning of last week i switched on and nothing. Disconnected, reconnected, cleared cosmos, took it apart and back together, tried it on it's own no monitor or anything connected. Every other switch on the fans ran so it's not power pack. Have done a lot of googling over the last week and keep coming back to flash Bios now that bits scary. Has anybody got any other idea's i can try first please, before i have to attempt the scary bit.
Thanks in advance.

So what exactly does happen when you power it on? Does the monitor get a signal? Is some sort of diagnostic message displayed?

Shite pc, uncle ended up buying a new motherboard for his, common on that model, take the hard drive out and bin it.

I updated my bios and now my laptop can take 8gb ram, where as before it could only take 2gb.

But I updated mine from hp website, and laptop was on at the time.

How are you going to flash the bios if it won't even boot?

Back up the current BIOS this way you can roll back.

Using a sub stick you should end up with a ROM file.
This the New Bios.

Flashing the BIOS is easy, there are instructions with the flash utility as you do it. But do not loose power doing this process.

If you can not get to the BIOS then you cant flash the BIOS.

When you flash the BIOS all your settings will be lost and default settings applied. SO save the BIOS as default settings and restart. Then tweak.

If you get nothing on the POST screen then flashing the bios is out of the question.

The post screen is when you turn it on and you get a picture saying ACER or something similar.

IT could be any or all of the following.
Motherboard (no real way of testing this as it has so many symptoms)
Chip (appear completely dead but fans come on?)
Ram (do you get any beeping on post (boot up?))
Monitor (does the status light turn green)

What you need is a spare chip a spare board and some spare ram. try swapping out the components, hoping that if your board is fried that it doesn't fry any of the new components.

I will buy the PC from you for £10 i will have a tinker with it and use it for bits, and i will collect it from you.

Thanks for all the comments and the offer to buy it, i'm going to keep it and have a fiddle myself. Let's face can't make it any worse can i.