Laptop Failure Detective Help Please

Hey everybody,

Couple friends of mine have had their laptops fail on them recently and now I'm trying to figure out why and how to fix em.

Both laptops are about 3 years old so it could just be wear over time but I'd like to find out why.

Situation 1
Laptop screen doesn't turn on. I can hear the hard drive spinning and everything else starting up including sound but the screen doesn't turn on. I'm guessing it's either a dead GPU or just a loose/broken connection to the screen. She told me her screen tended to flicker now and then.

I'm going to connect it to an external monitor tomorrow to see if its just the screen and I can get the data off that way or if I'll need to pull out the hard drive and put it in another laptop.

Situation 2
Randomly while browsing the internet his laptop freezes. He powers off the laptop then boots but no longer can get past the "starting windows" screen. After that screen it goes dark. Did a system restore and got it back up and running again but the problem occurred again.

Any thoughts on either situation and suggestions on what/how I should test them would be much appreciated.

 

Hey man, nice to see you on another thread other than the MSI one

The first one is definitely a hardware issue. It can be a few things as simple as a loose monitor connector to a failing motherboard or gpu.

Check the RAM first. If it has more than one DIMM, remove one at a time and try them in different slots to see if it POSTS. It may just be a bad DIMM.

It can also be a failed LCD inverter. Connecting an external display is a good bet although if it was a bad inverter you can tell because if you point a light source at the screen you will see a faint image (faint because the inverter is not powering the backlight).

It can also be a processor issue in which case it's a little harder to test unless you have an extra CPU that will work on that motherboard handy.

Also, try removing any PCIe devices like wlan cards and see if it POSTS.

The other thing that comes to mind, and which is probably the problem here is a bad motherboard or gpu. I would highly recommend baking it. It is something repair shops do all the time and is designed to reflow bad or broken solder points. If you are not familiar with this, let me know and I'll send you instructions. It worked for me on 2 different laptop boards that were experiencing similar symptoms as yours.

The second one sounds like a hardware issue as well. It may be an overheating processor. Change the paste and make sure the fan is working. I would also test the RAM, remove PCIe cards, try a different hard disk (although the hard disk is probably fine), and finally try the baking method one that on too.

 

Thanks a lot kosti. I'll take a shot and see what I can find. You seem to be an infinite river of knowledge lately lol. +rep

 

For the second situation, here another thought:

It could be a hard drive issue. Somehow, perhaps due to mechanical error, a critical OS file or two is getting corrupted, forcing you to restart. Upon restart, the OS doesn't boot up since it can't access said file. System restore would repair the file, but then it would become corrupted again after some use.

To check this, I'd get the harddrive diagnostics from whatever vendor it is and rule them to check for bad sectors and such.

 

Situation one is almost certainly the CCFL lamp in the screen going out.

A few notebooks before they started swapping to LED had bad lamps. I just did one the other day. They run about $30 on eBay, but my advice, buy a used screen. Seriously, that was the most stressful and time consuming job I have done in a long time. The bulbs are as long as the laptop is wide and are basically a 2mm thick florescent bulb that you have to insert without twisting or bending. Something you will be doing when you re-assemble the screen. The entire screen can likely be found for $100 if you look.

There was a bad supply of CCFL lamps sent to manufacturers.



The second one is most likely overheating.
It gets hot and locks up, at which point gets a chance to cool a bit. You restart and before you get into Windows it has heated up enough to lock up again.

Run a temp monitoring program and you will see at what point it's locking up and confirm it.
Check/clean out fans and heatsinks. Make sure they are spinning. If all seems well, you will need to remove them and replace the thermal tape.