After 4 solid years, G1 goes GSOD. Advice welcomed.

So after 4 solid years of service, my original G1 finally gave up the ghost last night and suffered the Grey Screen of Death.

I hooked it up to an external monitor and got artifacting on the Windows 7 boot screen before it blue-screened loading the Nvidia driver. A quick boot into safe mode using the standard VGA driver let me reach Windows but with artifacts on the screen, everything else (hardware/data wise) was still fine but the laptop screen itself was nothing but a depressing pale grey.

Given that the laptop is otherwise still fully functional, I tried a USB video card but unfortunately no drivers were available for x64 Win7. Given that now the laptop is probably done for, I'm going to disassemble it and try repasting the GPU. I did the CPU a while back but the full-dismantle to get at the GPU didn't seem worth it.

It's probably a fatal situation, but does anyone have any experience with coming back from a GSOD? My G1 has served me without fault for so long it's tough to see it finally die.

Incidentally, it was this forum that led me to make such a solid choice of laptop back then. No doubt i'll be relying on your good advice again to choose my next one.

 

I think you're done with your GPU, but you could always replace it.

 

I didn't realse it could be replaced. Does it involve swapping out the whole motherboard?

 

I'm not 100%. I know (ha! I believe I remember) at one point asus was replacing the g1 with the g1s because of the nvidia cards. I don't know if it was a mobo or just a card replacement though.

You should contact asus and let them know that your defective unit has died, and you don't want a replacement, but you would like to get a new asus and you feel like you're entitled to some sort of compensation - since it is a recognized problem, and they ought to have replaced it earlier in the life cycle for you.

 

Cool, thanks for the tip, i'll give Asus a call and see what they say. I also found this site Asus G1 A6JN Go7700 Intel CPU Motherboard 08G21GA0022i from global-motherboard.com that has refurbed mainboards for sale for not that much so looks like i've got that option too.

 

Apparently baking your laptop's motherboard in the oven for 8 minutes at 200C is a repair technique. I tried it, and my G1 lives once more!

Dunno how long i'll get out of it but pretty pleased nonetheless

 

Confy, congrats on the successful reflow. That's a serious accomplishment!

 

Thanks AllurGroceries, I must've had luck on my side today

Ruckus - yeah definitely time for a new one. Hopefully the repair job will allow me enough time to let all the new Sandy Bridge models become available. But if not i'll definitely check out the the refurbed G-series models.

 

Good job. The biggest problem with a reflow is failing to remove all the non-metal parts. It's not hard, but it is a little daunting. Then again, most hardware problems aren't really difficult to fix - just slow and steady, following the instructions.

Configuring slax/gentoo properly ... now that's a difficult task.

 

Faulty soldering. Aka nvidia defect. It will fail again. You could replace your g1s board with a g1sn board without the defect or Asus will replace the board for free if you mention faultly gpu/nvidia defect even out of warranty. "Replace" as with in another faulty GPU more than likely or offer you a replacement notebook.

I got a (new) g73JH at no cost due to my first G1S repair failing within a week of repair.