Death of a R500!

A little over a year ago I purchased my first laptop a R500, 8600M GT, C2D, It seemed good for only 1599$ then...

I was pleased. However, just a week ago It died. The night before it was fine, i shut it down, the next day, won't turn on.

Its exactly 1 Year and 4 Months old. Thats 4 months past the warranty!... Did they engineer this thing to break right after the warranty? lol. Its ok though because I bought it on Visa and they extend the warranty +2 years. So they can reimburse me for the costs (or if its too expensive to fix, they will give me a full refund). But they are slow it may take months, so I had to buy a new laptop.

Anyways, it still confuses the hell out of me, has anyone else had this problem with their LG laptop?...

Ill explain exactly what happens. I plug it in the wall, I turn it on, lights go on, a tiny bit of hard drive activity, and screen stays black, no picture, no back light. Fans DO turn on. CD drive DOES open and close.

And thats it, it will just sit there. If I try to run it off the battery, it does the same thing, BUT the fans don't turn on.

That night I went to buy a external 1TB hard drive to backup my dead laptops hard drive and when I bought it at the store me and the computer tech there decided to look at my laptop, everything was fine, Hard drive wasn't corrupt or anything, ram was fine (tried swapping and re-seating). I came to the conclusion its probably a mother board failure. When even attaching my laptop to a external display, it still displays nothing.

Anyways Ill probably be sending it out this week, but if anyone has had this happen or know whats causing it, I would love to know.

It just really surprised me how quick this laptop died. I treat it very well, it looks identical to the day I bought it. I don't really travel with it, Its in perfect condition, yet dead. However I do use it daily 2+ hours. But really is that much, I know friends who leave their laptops in bags for days on end in sleep mode and they last long. Mine I never even have it in a bag it always is sitting on a glass table with good airflow and always shut down properly.

Oh well, luck I guess.

 

It doesn't sound like a motherboard failure. Recently, Nvidia had a large increase in reports of 7th and 8th generation mobile cards failing as a result of poor quality manufacturing materials; a huge number of laptops across many manufacturers such as HP and Dell suffered from this problem. Basically, thermal cycles put stress on the poorly made solders on the chip, eventually resulting in cracks. This causes a failure in the GPU.

Have you tried plugging in an external monitor to see if you still get the black screen?

 

No Signal.

 

Then you likely have a GPU failure; for the GeForce 8600 this is not uncommon, unfortunately.

 

Really? GPU Failure? That would cause the screen backlight to not even come on and for fans to stop working in battery? But on AC?

I guess, thanks, it means alot.

 

Sounds like your graphics card is dead. The notebook still boots up? Test this by plugging in a monitor on the VGA port or through your HDTV with HDMI.


On a similar note:
A month and a bit after the warranty expired, my battery died.

And the notebook has been overheating during graphics intensive applications thanks to the faulty 8600m GT (although beta notebook drivers have somewhat helped).

And support from the manufacturer has been horrendous. Pretty much a few months after the product is released, updates and drivers stop coming out. You have to search for other similar products which have the same internal components and get the updated driver there. Or go to their Korean website to get the latest. Sorry, but not everyone reads Korean. You're a global company, then update your stuff on all countries where you have a market/website. What a PITA!

I want to buy a replacement battery, but the country's LG site's main component replacement website isn't even up. Replacements will have to come from 3rd party Australian vendors. I'm in Canada.

After this notebook dies, which I don't think will be too far in the distant future, I'm going to buy from a more reputable brand. I will never buy a product from LG again. They just don't care.


Sorry for invading your thread. I just needed a place to vent.