Advice on aging Clevo M570U

Posting here because this is perhaps the only forum where I've seen people that know what a Clevo is, much less how to start tinkering around inside one.

Currently, I'm in a bit of a dilemma - about a year ago both hinges on my M570U broke, and since I couldn't find affordable replacements anywhere I removed the entire LCD lid assembly (I was afraid of damaging the cables and making future repair impossible) and have basically been running it hooked up to an external monitor ever since. It's been fine, until recently - a couple of days ago the display on the external monitor quite suddenly started appearing odd. The only way I can think to describe it is oversaturated and blown out, as if the brightness and contrast were jacked all the way up even when I attempted to turn them down. I of course checked the monitor first, and when it worked fine with two other computers I went back to looking for problems with the Clevo. I reattached the LCD assembly, and found that the colors look fine on it - though the monitor does seem slightly dim to me, my wife is of the opinion that it always looked like that and since I haven't seen it in so long my memory is failing me - she could be right, I guess.

So this brings me to my current problem - ideally I'd scrap the system and buy a new one, but I'm broke, so I'm looking to fix it. I mainly could use advice on precisely what component is failing on me, and what else I could look for. I suspect the video card or the motherboard, but I know that really doesn't narrow it down much. If it could be narrowed down to one easily replaced part like the video card, I could use advice on where one could get replacement parts for the M570U in the US.

Thanks just for reading the above - and thanks in advance if you have any ideas.

 

hi and welcome back to the forum. as you said, the best place to find out more about clevo's.
im in uk but ive heard lots of talk about Newegg in the states.
you could also check out the clevo guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...-0-faq-reseller-info-read-before-posting.html

 

getting a replacement vid card for an M570U is not easy as it is a clevo proprietary part (not MXM), you have to look on ebay for one that would be compatible, and even then there might be vbios issues

 

Both my hinges broke this past year. There's no way to fix it other than replacing the part. Each hinge is around $15 to replace. The assembly is pretty easy once you see what the hinge looks like. The part that breaks off is made with some sort of pot metal. Though my hinges lasted 2.5-3 years. So maybe it wasn't that bad a decision for them to engineer this part with inferior metal.

I would try cleaning out the dust, and applying new thermal paste to the gpu and cpu before you order parts.

way to increase your post count, champ

 

If you are just planning to continue to use external display, you should try to re-install the gpu drivers. As long as the laptop monitor looks good when connected, there is probably no problem with it, but something else may be wrong. Be careful when unistalling the drivers of gpu, because once uninstalled, you can't reconnect your monitor to work till you install them again, because with no drivers, no port compatibility, meaning that you should use the internal laptop monitor to do that. Also, the HDMI/DVI port may be the issue.