Screen not turning on

Hi Guys,

I think I know what the answer here will be, but as I really hope its repairable I'll ask here anyway

I had a slight grinding on my LHS graphics card fan so I took out the card to get to it (turns out the bearing in the fan has gone, but thats aother story. After putting it all back together I switched on the M17x and saw nothing on the screen. All lights on the keyboard were on, as were the lights on the aline heads and the ALIENWARE ate the bottom of the monitor.

I have tried the usual tricks of discharging the power etc with no luck, and I have plugged an external LCD into the VGA port and pressing [FN]+[F6], again with no luck.

I called tech support and they ran me through the eact same tests and came to the conclusion that the graphics card is nackered, they will send out a courier to pick it up on Tuesday.

As I would rather not be laptop free for 15+ days, does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks a bunch!

 

Get 'em to ship it to you instead of collection....depending on warranty status, you *should* be entitled to NBD hardware if im not mistaken?

Try it, if youre comfortable with replacing it yourself, eh?

 

So the original problem was the LHS GPU fan, and when the dust settled you no longer had any signal to the LCD? You don't have to pull the LCD connectors to get to the cards though. I would have to suggest rechecking all of your connections. Dell won't let you do anything GPU or GPU fan related yourself. They have to send out a Technician.

 

Have you tried to redo the job? Maybe some connector wrongly placed.

 

Stevie - I mentioned the NBD warranty thing but the guy at tech support said they weren't 100% sure what the problem was

Talon - I didnt touch any of the LCD connectors, but I have since reseated them to be sure.

I would quite happily fit it all myself if they'd just supply me with the parts, but I have reason to believe its the integrated graphics rather than the dedicated.

No ideas how I might be able to fix it myself before Tuesday?

Cheers

 

When you wrongly seat the LCD cable (the connectors touch the wrong ones on the socket) there's information that's sent to protect your motherboard.
Try this after making sure the LCD cable is properly in place:
-Remove the battery from your system.
-Unplug the charger
-remove the CMOS battery near the CPU fan
-press the on/off button for ~20seconds.

 

Hi All,

Thanks for the ideas (Katalin - tried your idea still with no luck ) but I ended up resorting to warranty.

Got the laptop picked up 2 days after contacting support and had it back within the week. Would you believe it was the RAM?

So in case anyone else out there has a similar issue - check your RAM before giving up hope

 

And not only,a good advice would be to start up your system with the minimum config and start adding to detect the culprit.
Glad you got it sorted.