W3J Video Problem

Alright here is my issue. Last year, about the first week in July I picked up a W3J. A week later, the video died on it. I would turn it on, the LCD would never turn on. It was not a backlight problem because when shining a light on it you could still see no picture(when the backlight is completely off you can still make out stuff on the screen). The screen was just dead. So I let it boot up with no video, to see if I could hook up an external monitor. That didn't work either. So I hit the power button, I hear it go through the shutdown process, the hard drive spins down, but it never actually turns off. I had to hold the power button down to get it to turn off.

I sent it away, and it came back fine. I've been using it since about the 3rd week of July 06, through 2 semesters of college. Worked perfectly. Today, it did it again. I tried the external monitor, no dice, and also the same weird problem where it wouldn't properly turn off, only spin down the hard drive. I screwed around with it for a bit, and ended up turning it on and off 3 or so times. THANKFULLY it randomly started working again. But now I have the worry that it could do this at any time. I'm not in school till September, so I have plenty of time to sort this out, but what are your recommendations?

 

I do remember people having this particular problem.

When it does happen again, try to boot to bios and see if it comes up. You ideally want to boot to the option where you get 4 options of Windows, I believe pressing F8 will do it.

So pressing F8 should show options of going into Windows, then pick Windows with enabled video.

This is where you will want to in and reinstall the video card drivers and then reboot and that should fix the problem if it comes up again.

This does not work for all cases. I have had this happen to me a few times and that is what I did, and suggested to others.

 

Alrighty, next time it happens I'll try getting into the bios or holding F8, but when I say no video I mean right from bootup, no drivers or anything loaded yet. The Asus logo never comes up. Anyway its working right now, my main concern is should I send it away, and if I do what do I tell Asus to make sure I get the problem solved for good.

 

My screen didn't turn on once when I booted up. I just closed the lcd and opened it again. Faulty open/close switch?

 

Driver bug. Happens to many notebooks.
Edit: whoops didn't read carefully enough. If it didn't turn on at all (no ASUS logo) I don't know what the problem was.
If this would happen after standby it would be a driver issue.

Sounds like a hardware problem rather than drivers, really... If the problem does appear again I would suggest you RMA it -- there'll be a good chance it'll work when getting there and they might just send it back, but I have no other idea

 

Yeah you know it eh? It would definitely work for them when they powered it up. Actually when you say that it makes me wonder if that's exactly what happened last year, they power it on, everything seems fine so they just send it back. The only weird thing is why would there be an intermittent bug that only strikes once a year? Only thing I can think of is climate, last year this happened in the summer, and yesterday was the first big day of +30C weather, so maybe some weak solder joint expanded and pushed off the contact. I have no idea.

Thanks for the replys!

 

I just sent in a W3J with an unreproducible (at least not on-demand) video card bug and it seems they fixed it no questions asked so I doubt it'll be too big an issue if you thoroughly explain the problem.

~ Brett