My old (kinda old - 2018) Acer Aspire E5 started acting weird by not powering on sometimes. Sometimes it will boot, sometimes it will not. Just blank screen and power LED for 3sec and then shutdown. I did everything I could to troubleshoot this, changed RAM, tried different power adapters, removed every possible component from the motherboard, and so on. Basically did everything that every tutorial on the internet tells you to do in this situation... I gave up since I couldn't resolve this issue myself and just let the guys at a local repair shop find out what's the cause of this issue.

My initial guess was that the laptop is not POSTing and something prevents it from properly booting up, either a short circuit or faulty component, but IDK because it was so random that sometimes it boots up and sometimes it doesn't.

Two days after the guy at the repair shop told me that it's the motherboard issue, something to do with auto-cutoff, which needs further investigation and the price is going to be RM390 (+ RM30 for inspection), with two weeks repair time. I'm still to decide whether to take the laptop from them or keep it for repair. I'm kinda skeptical since I've never had anything repaired by someone else and I want to be sure that I'm not being scammed. Is this a reasonable price for this kind of repair? I'll be glad to see what you guys think about it, maybe there is a reason for this whole thing that I don't know or it is easily repairable...

Yes, as I said, tried everything I could, even bare motherboard with no RAM, no HDD, no cards, no battery, and fan - power cable only, still shuts down in 3 sec

No... he just said that it's a motherboard issue with auto-cutoff, and he will TRY to repair it... He didn't say the exact issue. As for the spare mobo, the price for this laptop is around RM1000+ so I don't think he'll try to replace it...