Another weird laptop story to tell

So I get this Asus quite new but heavily used laptop. Firstly there was no display, the lcd panel was complete removed and cables were cut and left hanging around. Anyway the first impression about laptop was good since, it has i5 inside and components seems to be in good shape, althought there intel hd graphics which makes the case little tricky if this laptop be wanted to run games etc. In other words good laptop for daily uses, browsing and coding etc...

Okay so lets get started: When I get this laptop to my hands I plugged it to the VGA monitor and nothing happened in monitor. The laptop turned on and started to do basic startup warmings. After that I took it to the HDMI monitor and woula it worked, quite amazing but I took it.

After testing does it work and looking inside what there was left, I decided to repiar/ fix/ do something on it and took it apart. Everything went quite well and nicely. New thermal paste inside and cleaning the dust out of the case. After putting it back together and testing with monitors: HDMI works, VGA no.

Next day I was thinking to do some kind of new case where to put the components, since the case was missing the bottom cover, but then just chilled out and left it for few days. Today I was going to check does it still work and plugged it into HDMI monitor and was scratching my head since nothing was displayed on monitor and the monitor said no signal and went to the sleep. Also checked the VGA monitor but gave the same result. + There was weird glitch when the AC cable was plugged into laptop it started automaticly. (I tired another CMOS battery which didn't turn on when power cable was plugged)

After few hours I decided to but it into oven, (I got one laptop which went into oven and came back as winner, it had also display problems or something similiar). So I baked the mobo with my 99 cooking skill for 8 minutes at 170C and let it to cool about 30 mins before took it back to my "work station". Plugged quickly everything necessary to get it powered and nothing seemed to happen, waited like 5- 10 seconds and thought well how do smash this thing to pieces till the power led started to flash and monitor (HDMI) this time gave the loose connection till it said no signal and repeated it untill I shut it down.

Okay I was quite supprising, well quite alot. Then I assembled the laptop and plugged it to the HDMI monitor and the same thing occured: loose connection like it was going to show me the picture but then no signal and repeated it until I removed the cable...

Few minutes wondering what is going on and the VGA monitor was lying on the floor so I was like well can't lose anything, so I plugged the laptop into VGA monitor and was ready to pull the power cable from wall when saw the windows logging screen and was more than supprised. I tried again with the HDMI but no it gives me the same result with connecting but not connecting.

Now I'm wondering if the HDMI port is damaged in laptop, so should I replace it with new one or what? Any help would be more thatn welcomed.

TLTR? well trying to practice my english writting skill.

 

Is the laptop running on integrated only or does it also have a dedicated GPU?

One of my old laptops had some strange wiring where the integrated GPU was wired to the internal display and VGA but the HDMI and (presumably) display port was wired to the dedicated GPU. This made life in linux awful with the HDMI and display port unusable because of optimus drivers. I'm curious to know if a failed/failing dGPU or iGPU is causing problems.

Kudos for successfully baking a laptop
I think the only time I've ever been that desperate was when I was attempting to repair an old xbox 360. It was a miserable failure.

 

The laptop only have integrated GPU, but I took the laptop once again under my eyes and disassembled it once again before posting this. Can't say which one of my actions did it, but I managed to get the HDMI port back to alive .

1. There was one pin little bend (ports circuit -> | <- main circuit). So I corrected it's position.
2. Cleaned the HDMI port with the turpentine + cleaned well with air.
3. Pushed down those HDMI port hold mechanics so the cable is connected more firm.
4. Took second HDMI cable just in case if the HDMI cable had something wrong with the connections.
5. Put it the laptop back together and plugged power cable.

The laptop turned on, and fan stopped spinning.... Plugged the laptop into the VGA monitor to check if it still works and it did. After that I took the HDMI cable and plugged it in and it did work with the HDMI monitor. Anyway so far I'm positively suprised with the laptop. Next stop with the laptop would be buying SSD on it + need to figure out that power cable glitch, maybe BIOS update will do that or more time inside oven to learn behave . Either way at the moment it looks pretty stable.

Idling tempatures are quite good 36C on CPU and around 45C GPU. Althought the CPU and cooling copper is separated quite many times now so it might not be the most best result what this laptop can do.

About the baking mobos, I'm at the moment 2 out of 2 succsfullybroughtalivelaptoprepairmaniacstreak . "If you don't try: You have done nothing".

I still got one laptop which is "under going maintance" or something. It's quite old laptop I would say something like 6- 8 years. Everything works great but the GPU's cooling copper ain't connected when paste is placed... Maybe thermal tape or something similiar would do the trick. One funny thing about that laptop is the GPU cooling attachment is only made from one side so the other side is floating in air... Bad design if ask me. Althought I really don't care since the laptop would be able to run smoothly, because it's specs inside.

 

..most likely it's just a bad connector on either of the cable options, making one randomly fail and switch to the other, that sort of thing.

Btw, the entire baking the motherboard thing -- the way it works is that most of the solder points on the pcb on a mainboard are either coated in some way to make them sturdier, or contain metal with a higher melting point than the tin-solder you'd get in a store. But the second pass, so to speak, on the motherboards - such as the power connectors, the video ports, usb connectors, things of that sort - is soldered on with lower melting point solder, that typically melts at some 180C. So if the contact points on a socket down on the mainboard has come off (after being heated up and cooled down, then cracked, etc), or the bottom of the solder got lifted over the contact, etc. Then a homemade reflow at temps below the 280C type solder melts can actually work to get the contact points back, as long as the solder point is still placed the way they should be. Don't exactly have any guarantees here, though

And if the monitor actually works, in spite of a bad connector to the external display, I don't think I would have touched the thing. Along that line of thinking, changing components, that sort of thing -- it's surprisingly hard to get two decent and separated solders on even a simple contact..

 

If you are going to reflow, always use no-clean liquid flux to help properly reform joints. It is cheap, you can get from ebay.