boot on acer TM 290
 

Hi,
trying to install a distro on my girfriends acer travelmate. Now, I have a problem I have never seen before: I cannot enter the menu where I can change the boot device order to boot from CD first, nor can I enter the bios to change things there.
This is because the screen on this laptop stays black, meaning switched off, until windows is already booted. So basically I see nothing, the hard disk is already working, then for one second the acer startup screen shows up, and instantly after that the windows welcome screen.
I already flashed the bios, installed recent chipset drivers, installed recent graphics card drivers. Nothing.

Basically can somebody tell me how I make the screen come up right on startup, so I can access and work in the bios (I dont even know what f-key I have to press on acer machines), or can somebody tell me how I can -blindly- enter the boot device selection men and choose CD as first boot device.

Thanks

p.s. this laptop has been serviced by acer once, and ever since it has this black screen problem.

try the F1 or the delete key

problem solved.
it is F2 to enter the bios on this machine.
Then I had to press fn+F5 to change monitors, and suddenly bios shows up. Weird.
Thanks anyway.