m17x problem: black screen

Hello,

Today I went ahead and did a little dust cleaning inside my m17x like I have done in the past and upon putting my machine back together, found that the LCD screen seemed to not be starting up, although the fans, lights, dvd drive, etc, all seem to be working. Also, I am not sure my machine is even booting up all the way as I do not get the point where I here the windows start up jingle. So, just looking for any help getting my machine up and running again.

Here is a list of what I did to it:
1. Power down, battery out, static discharge
2. REmove back plate thing
3. Remove control panel (power button, vol buttons, etc)
4. Remove keyboard.
5. Remove graphics card.
6. Clean graphics card and graphics card fan with compressed air duster.
7. Open up and clean fan behind motherboard/cpu with compressed air duster.
8. Reassembled

Quite careful in all my steps, have done this several times as the m17x sucks dust in pretty bad, never had any problems post-cleaning.

My first thought was potentially LCD seating was screwed up? But I am thinking this may not be the case as the machine doesn't seem to be fully booting on power-up.

*edit* I want to add that upon powering up the machine, the fans seem to kick on medium/high power (like they normally would) for less than 1 second (where they would normally be at medium/high power for 10+ seconds) before things seem to idle out and the computers fails to commence any further signs of starting up.

Thanks!

 

hmmmm...any beeps when you power it on?

Try reseating the vid card

 

No beeps when powering it on. Went back and pulled the pulled the vid card again, and made sure to seat it properly, no luck. Made sure all the connections I unhooked were reseated as perfectly as I possibly could, no bueno.

 

Any LED error codes? link

 

Nope, no LED error messages. Scroll lock, caps lock, num lock not illuminating at all on boot.

 

Have you tried attaching an external monitor?

Although complete failure maybe poor supply getting to it, does it get further on battery?

Another thing to check is intentionally cause a fault, daft sounding I know, if the m17x beeps when no ram installed, try that, that would atleast show it was doing something.

 

Tried attaching external monitor, did nothing. Although I have tried hooking it up via VGA cord to a projector in the past and it has not worked, so the VGA hookup may be bad in the first place.

It could be a power supply issue, but generally begins to boot up in the same manner regardless of being on battery power, AC w/ no battery, or AC w/ battery.

I will try taking the RAM out and see if I get any beeps...

Have been thinking more and more that it could be a vid card issue... I recently disabled the hybrid graphics and disabled the integrated graphics driver to get more stability out of my machine. I was thinking that if my vid card went out it wouldn't be able to fall back on integrated graphics processing since it is disabled. Anyone think this could be happening?... Is there anyway to re-activate integrated graphics processing with a black screen?

 

So, RAM removed and when I boot up the machine I get no beeps but the left 2 LEDs flashing (scroll lock and caps lock), num lock LED solid. So this shows that the video card is preventing system from completing POST, interesting that this shows up only after I pull the RAM. Don't see how my video card would have gone down the ter after simply pulling it out to clean behind and then putting it back in. Maybe a connection problem? Any ideas?..