NP7370 Motherboard Failure?

Hello everyone, I have to say I think I'm at wit's end with this laptop. I love it, but it has been a consistent pain to work with, and I'm hoping for any advice which would save me from having to return it to Sager for the third time.

I had to get a display replaced almost as soon as I got it in late 2013, and earlier this year I had a MOBO failure which required me to return to Sager for a replacement, and now, I fear I have to again. Here's the full story of what has happened recently.

I decided to upgrade from windows 8.1 to windows 10 last week, and shortly after the upgrade I began to have a few display driver failures which recovered almost immediately. Then, I had boot failure, followed by un-repairable disc failure, leading to the machine being unable to fix itself, or restore itself to a functioning level.

I figured all I could do at that point was reformat the HDD, and start over with a fresh Win8.1 install, but as soon as I tried, my display completely stopped working, and the HDD recognition LEDs are no longer lighting up on startup. I tried to use a monitor through the HDMI input as a display, but received no signal.

I spent $600 in July to replace the motherboard, and I'm really hoping to not have to spend several hundred dollars on repair, or even more on replacing the whole machine. Anyone have any advice whatsoever?

 

Apologies, it's 3 AM here and I didn't see the stickied post about the bricked systems. Reading through it now.

 

omg, how much bad luck can one person have with his machine? werent u able to get the mobo replacement inside of warranty or had it already expired at that point in time?

what you could do is politely ask @Mr. Fox here to fix up the display for you, that way you´d only have to pay for shipping costs both ways either that or read through the stickied thread and try to teach yourself how to repair the damaged display edid, which would require buying a programmer though!

btw, have you tried to connect your machine to an external display? with a bit of luck u might get a signal there...

 

Dang... another victim of Windows 10. Never seen an OS cause so much damage. Pretty scary when you stop and think about it.

Did you have EVGA Precision X installed?

Is the machine eDP or LVDS? I can flash LVDS if someone can provide a good EDID.

 

For the board alone??

Is there any change if you:

1.Power cycle (remove all power, hold power button for 5 seconds, reconnect battery and/or charger)
2. Reseat, move, or remove a memory module
3. Pull the HDD (and does the HDD work on another system, if you're able to connect it to something else?)

I hope you're not looking at another repair/replacement.

 

@jaybee83 I only had a 1 year warranty, which expired in 2014, so I had to pay out of pocket. The original display snafu I think may have been caused by being dropped in transit, because the display cable had been damaged, so the display only worked at certain angles. Also, one of the RAM slots had been damaged so that it never detected RAM or held a stick well. Unfortunately, it took me until after the warranty expired to expand my RAM enough to use that slot, so I didn't know it was broken until too late. And I did try to put it onto an external monitor through the HDMI port, but the monitor said it wasn't receiving any signal.

@Mr. Fox Never had EVGA Precision X installed because I don't feel comfortable overclocking laptops, too little heat dissipation for my liking. I'm sorry but I don't know if it's LVDS or eDP screen. Is there a way I could tell?

@Prostar Computer It wasn't cheap. Power cycling doesn't do anything, that was the first thing I tried. Early on I pulled some of the RAM because I didn't know if Windows had possibly made a mistake and upgraded to 32 bit rather than 64, so I dropped down to 4GB of RAM from 20GB, and still no change in it's ability to restore/repair itself. That was before the display errors occurred The HDD is detected by other machines, via USB SATA wire. Good news, it functions still, bad news, there's nothing on it because of the attempted reformat/reinstall.

Thanks for the responses, guys. I appreciate it.

 

omg, pls tell me u didnt have any important data on that drive....that would just be too much for me to take after reading ur previous posts!

unfortunately, now that u dont have any display output ud have to take off the bezel and check the display's connector to the mobo manually... either that or check for a sticker with the model number on it, through which we can deduce the type of connector.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Dang... it's sounding like the board again.

Any way you can confirm they gave you a replacement and not a reworked board? You might be outside of their parts warranty, but it's possible that they can mitigate the cost since this has happened within a short amount of time.

 

Most of my papers were backed up on flash drives, though I'm afraid I did lose a few papers, and a lot of research materials, but nothing critical.

I can't pop it open right now, since I'm about to walk out the door to work, but I can check it tonight. I know it's a 40 pin connector, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I thought about contacting Sager, and seeing if there was anything they could do. The sticker label on the bottom of the MOBO says JULY '15, but that's probably just a reinstall date, since that's when I had the crash earlier this year.

 

well at least not a total loss then very glad to hear that... well figure this out, hang in there!

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk