Z70va fan turns off right away

Greetings everyone,

I've had this notebook for almost two years now and this is the first major problem its giving me. Basically today, I was just browsing the net when my whole screen went blackand the computer went silent. I tried starting the laptop up again, and it would turn on for a few seconds then computer would go silent and not do anything (although the lights are all on still so it seems the laptop is on). Only way to turn it off is to manually hold down the power button.

I opened up the compartment that holds the Heatsink, fan, and CPU and what's happening is that the fan turns on, then turns off about a second or so afterwards. I even unscrewed the fan and removed dust buildup on the heatsink but that did not help at all. Is it safe to say that it is the fan that is the problem or could there be other factors that might be turning the fan off on startup? If it is the fan, I can easily replace it myself as it was easy removing the fan to clean out the heatsink, but finding a replacement for something that's almost two years old is probably going to be a pain. I live in hawaii so I'm assuming everything will probably have to come from the continent (my reseller or some other shop) or maybe perhaps Asus?

Just a small background on the laptop, I haven't installed any third party utility software, but I do use this laptop extensively for my programming classes, and also WOW. If it helps, I bought this notebook from ISTNC.

Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated! Thank you

-Sonny

 

If you don't see anything on the screen I doubt the fan is the cause. I would say rather that the fan is turned off with (part of) the rest of the system, because of some other hardware fault. Even if the computer overheats due to powered off fan, if you leave it for half an hour it will still run for some minutes before overheating.

What is possible is that the fan stopped working and the computer overheated, and something melted.

Anyway, I have heard people mentioning a thread on "what to do when your laptop does not boot" but I don't know where it is. Here is what I'd do:

0. Unplug ALL peripherals.

1. Plug the computer into an external monitor, see if I get an image. If not, then it's not the LCD.

2. Remove the battery, push power button several times for 15 seconds at a time. Plug the computer to the power line, try to boot up.

3. If you have 2 chips of RAM, remove each of them at a time, try to boot with the other. If it doesn't with either of them, it's not bad RAM

4. Remove HDD and try to boot from a CD (like a Windows bootable CD or whatever). Although it's very unlikely that a faulty HDD will cause a black screen.

If you still get a black screen after all these things, there's not much more you can do... I would suspect a motherboard fault but without more info I cannot be sure.

Post back with any results.

On components: There is the ASUS estore but I don't think they ship outside continental US and Canada.

 

Thank you for all your tips.

0. This is one of the first things that I did, but it still failed. I usually have a notebook cooler to help my asus stay cool because it gets pretty hot but it so happened that when my notebook blacked out was when I didn' have the notepad cooler.

1. This is actually the first thing I did but nothing happened

2. Did the exact step, still nothing.

3. This was the only test I could not do because I only have one stick of RAM. My gf's notebook had a different type of ram so I could not switch between the two. However, I recall having a bad ram on a desktop and all it did was not past the POST, but fan was still on, etc. so I'm thinking that it shouldn't be the RAM (?)

4. Although I did not boot from a CD, I did hook the hard drive to a USB enclosure and I was able to access the hard drive via USB.

I really need a notebook for school so I'm weighing my options on whether I should send this over to one of our friendly NBR notebook shops for repair or just get myself a new one (f8 is looking really really sexy) . Again, thank you for your reply.

 

Yeah, so it's either RAM or (something on) the motherboard.