somewhat OT: problem with laptop and linux

[Rynhardt P Kruger]

Hi,

I have a strange problem.
I have an acer travelmate 4062LCi laptop that was running ubuntu
8.04 until recently.
A few days ago, I turned on the laptop that was on hibernate and after
it asked me my password, it just didn't say any thing more. 	
I pressed some keys, but because I haven't installed my custom speakup
kernel yet, I couldn't get any more output.
When I held in the power button to turn it off, I hered for a second
orca saying something and then the laptop died.
When I booted again, it just hanged at some point and when I got someone
with eyes to the laptop, they told me that it is showing a blank screen
with a blinking cursor in the bottom right corner.
I tried to run Ubuntu from the live CD, but it gave the same blank
screen. I tried running grml1.1 live, but it stopped at the stage where
it searches for the grml file. With both Cd's, the CD just stops and
spin down, and you are Abel to take it out of the drive. Do you think it
is a hardware or a software problem?
I think that it may be something stuck in the ram, it happened someday
with my desktop PC, but I don't want to open my laptop, it is so
different from a desktop PC.
If I could just remove the ram and put it back again...

Thanks for any help ahead of time.

Take care,

Rynhardt