C90s is kicking the bucket?

Hey everyone, I was hoping you could give me a little advice on a situation that popped up this morning.

My C90s had been working fine since...well, this morning. I was in bed reading some pdfs and then shut it off. I then remembered there was something I wanted to look at, so I booted it up again only to find that the screen has no response to power. It's hard to say whether or not the POST is going through or not, but I believe it is as depending on when I hit the power button, it may power off immediately or in a little bit (typical for whether the power is hit during POST or during WinXP bootup). I tried connecting an external monitor to it during startup via VGA but there's no signal. My first guess would be that the video card died out on me, as I opened it up and made sure the video panel cable (top left corner when laptop is right side up) is connected well.

Opinions? Options?

 

Did you have the laptop on your lap or proped up on something or just sitting there on your lap with the blankets.

There are very few reasons laptops will shut themselves down. I suspect that if you had in your lap ontop of your blanket or something that it choked itself for air and overheated and shut it self down to protect the hardware. If it did this, and say 30-45 minutes later when it cooled down, did you try and boot it back up and try again and see?

 

Are there funky scan lines on your screen with odd colors etc? Or is the screen just BLACK?

 

legacy: I must have phrased myself wrong. I've had the problem you're describing -- the laptop rebooting due to overheating -- but this wasn't it. I shut it down myself, and the laptop was sitting on a plastic bag that gives it a lot of air.

brehidran: no funky scan lines. No anything, in fact. The screen doesn't even respond to the machine being turned on.

 

When you boot it up and it goes to a blank screen, when you press the power button, does your laptop immediately turn off without having to press and hold the power button? If so, then either your motherboard is bad or your GPU is bad.

Also, I just re-read your post and I read it wrong, I applogize for my earlier post then.

 

Which video card do you have? The 8600 with GDDR3 or 2?

 

Does it matter really?
The 8600m is known faulty.

Can you take the video card out?

 

Yes, because the GDDR3 version runs much hotter and are more prone to failures. Also, not that this is necessarily the case, but should also be mentioned that Asus supplied only a 90W power adapters to the early C90S models which doesn't supply enough power for units with GDDR3 GPUs. If the laptop is drawing more than 90W and a battery is not plugged in, the laptop will fail to start.

 

Three possibilites here, of which two I have experienced with the same machine. In order of likelyhood;

1.) Motherboard dead
2.) GPU dead
3.) HDD dead

I have experienced HDD dying and you will still get post and will be able to access bios still so I am very sure it isn't your HDD. I have also experienced the motherboard dying and I had exactly the same symtoms you are describing. The repair centre thought it was the GPU as did I but after changing it they realised it was the motherboard instead that had failed.

If you are still within warranty I suggest telling asus to check the motherboard before they replace the GPU otherwise they might change your GPU for no reason at all like they did with me and you might end up with a GPU downgrade. If not then I am afraid financially it is time to look around for a new laptop.