Acer Aspire 5532 console blanking, won't resume, shuts down

[svartulf]

I'm doing an install on an Acer Aspire 5532 (wife's old laptop) but have been having an issue with the console blanking and eventually the box shutting down. Once the terminal blanks, it won't resume when I hit keys, but SSH sessions are still active. Eventually (after perhaps 10min) the box just shuts off. I've installed ACPI and app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools and disabled blanking (set CONTROL_TERMINAL=0 in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/terminal-blanking.conf), and disabled hibernation in the kernel (CONFIG_HIBERNATION not set) but the piece of garbage won't keep running (shut down as I was typing this sentence, coincidentally). The battery's shot and I thought there might be some issue with the kernel or hardware detecting it being critically low, but I've removed it and even on straight AC power it shuts down. I'm running out of ideas - any idea on what I need to keep the terminal from blanking, or how to get it to resume, and how to keep it from shutting down?