Compal FL90 needs repair... which?

Hello,

one week ago the FL 90 of my wife stopped functioning.

It is a T8100/2.1Ghz - 4GB - 320 GB - WLAN/BT/TV setup.

Wonderful machine so far.

One week ago, it worked as usual in the morning. Later that day, It wouldn't boot - and of course hasn't booted ever since. Swithiching the device on, I see nothing. The display doesn't even get backlighted.

I have found a lot of interesting remarks regarding the GFX card in the FL90 including a lot of suggestions to bake/heat it. I am a bit reluctant about this, however, since the FL90 does NOT boot at all. In the posts where people report success about this, I am under the impression that the FL 90 would at least still boot (like HDD activity), yet without displaying anything. Not in my case.

Since there is almost no boot activity I have put the CPU in a different laptop, it works. I also tried the CPU of the other laptop (P8600) in the FL90, but that did not change anything. So I put the T8100 back in.

Removing any devices like RAM and HDD didn't work either.

Any suggestions what I can do?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Yours,
McTrinsic

 

My FL90 did teh same thing. Repair guys said that, the gpu was shorted.

 

So, a few things to report back...

I did bake the GPU. Nothing achieved.

Replaced the GPU with an ATI (MSI) 3650 512MB - nothing.

So now I got a nice brick.

Any ideas?

Is it possible that the replacement GPU doesnt work either?

McTrinsic

 

Well it still could be that the issue is with the mobo itself.
Also I'm not completely sure, but when replacing the gpu with an ati card, could there also still be a need for a matching/different bios?

 

I was luck to quickly get a replacement Mobo as well.

Turns out, both MoBo and GPU were broken.

It works again now ... and cost me like 200 € ...

*Sigh*

During testing I found out that I could not get a C2D - P8600 to work. The original CPU is a T8100. Any ideas why?

McT

 

Bios update on the new MB?

 

Be sure to dump both parts on ebay, will give you around 50€ back.

I also would suggest a BIOS update to 1.18, but I think the P-Series will still not work.

Cheers

 

Hi all,

thanks for the answers - was busy installing the new MoBo and GFX.

Works like charm - hardware-wise.

Win 7 has a few (minor) driver issues.

Thanks a lot for the help!

McT

 

even if P8600 worked, it wouldn't be ideal, because 965PM doesn't support 1066MHz FSB required for it, so in best case scenario it would be capped at 800MHz, resulting in operating frequency of just 1.8GHz

 

The P8600 will never work - the Intel PM965 does not support 1066MHz CPUs.

And by "does not support", I mean "intentionally designed to reject CPUs that identify as 1066MHz", as proven by Niffcreature's testing (he did a motherboard hardware mod to fool the PM965 into believing that it was working with an 800MHz CPU, and then overclocked the FSB to 1066MHz using software, and it worked).