And yet another thing breaks...

Seems like everything around here is falling apart.

This morning when I went to turn on my laptop, absolutely nothing happened. Well, not nothing. The power light comes on and the light that shows that the laptop is plugged in came on too. But no POST, no display, or anything (no hard drive activity or fan noise or anything). Before you suggest any fixes, here's all that I've tried:

• Connecting to an external monitor and my TV - still nothing comes on the screen
• Holding down the power button for a minute without any power source (battery or adapter) plugged in, then trying to turn it on after that - still nothing
• Taking out RAM - tried turning it on with no RAM, testing one stick at a time in both slots - still nothing, not even any beeps or error messages
• Cleaning it with compressed air

The computer doesn't even show the Acer screen that you see when it starts up, so I'm guessing it's a faulty motherboard. But I don't want to spend money on a motherboard since I'm not sure if that will really fix it - I don't want to waste money on something that might not work because that money could go towards buying a brand new one. Plus, I kind of wanted a new laptop anyway. :P

But still, it's not a very good time and I hate unexpectedly having to spend money on things like this, especially since a new laptop with the specs I want don't come cheap.

Here's what I DON'T want:

• Windows 8 - kind of hard to avoid this (along with the other things I'm trying to avoid) unless you custom configure one
• Integrated Intel graphics - no thank you! I plan to play games and most don't work so well with integrated Intel graphics
• A touchpad without buttons - I want a real button for right clicking, not to use a multitouch gesture of some sort
• Something prone to overheating - I think this might have contributed to the death of my last laptop (it lasted about 2 months shy of 3 years). My Aspire 4540 would always overheat and shut off whenever I'd do anything graphics intensive. It would even sometimes overheat with a Cooler Master Notepal X2. I always had to keep an eye on my core temperatures to make sure I stopped what I was doing as soon as it got anywhere near 107 degrees Celsius (not sure how hot that is in Fahrenheit because it was easier for me to look at the degrees in HW Monitor in Celsius)

So that's all I don't want. Even just ONE of those in ANY prebuilt laptop configuration that I look at is a deal breaker. I'll probably end up getting one with Windows 8 though - I'm looking at maybe getting the CyberPowerPC GXX6-9220, but the prebuilt configuration of it comes with Windows 8. It's cheaper to get it prebuilt from a retailer than to custom configure one through their website. Just the shipping cost alone on their website adds $49 to the price of anything I configure - I can get the prebuilt one from a few retailers with cheaper or even free shipping. Plus, if I custom configure it, I'd have to wait a lot longer to get it, which is why I might end up settling for a computer with Win 8 even though I'd rather have Windows 7.