p151HM failed. Looking for some information.

Hi,

Unfortunately I made the mistake of buying a used p151hm off of craigslist. I had it working for 3 hours before it shut off in the middle of a game of LoL, and shows no signs of life upon the power button being pressed down. I was able to install Windows 7, all the proper drivers, install steam, lol, ect. I then tried to test out LoL, and 10 seconds into the map loading the laptop shut down completely as if it had a power failure. Just an immediate complete power down.

I attempted to remove the HD, ram, video card, disc drive, ect in order to diagnose a possible hardware failure, but no matter what i did in what combination, the computer would not power on at all. No lights, no fans. Whenever I plug the power supply into the back, the green light on the power supply immediately turns off. This behavior is repeated with both working power supplies that I received with the laptop. This led me to believe that there was a short somewhere, so I tested the jack in the back for continuity, however it was an open circuit.

My knowledge is enough to assume that the motherboard is probably the cause of the failure. Honestly I paid only slightly more than what a new motherboard costs to replace, and the seller is not being reasonable with me about selling a clearly defective item. So now I'm on these forums hoping to find someone who can point me in a good direction about what steps to take next. At this point, I plan on getting the expensive components tested and then sell the parts on ebay or similar.

Ideally, I would love to find a simple solution to this problem, perhaps an easily removed resistor that failed on the motherboard, however I have never done anything like that and I wouldn't know how/where to start. If you think you have any information that could help my situation, please speak up. I am a student; absolutely broke. I need this laptop for school and IT TOTALLY SUCKS that this happened. Thanks.

 

You may try to reset the BIOS battery. Remove AC Power, main battery and then BIOS battery (below the keyboard) for at least 30s.

Service manual with exact location and how to reach it is in my signature.

Good Luck!

 

Often times a sudden shut down is because of thermal issues. The fact is shut down during gaming leads me to believe that even more. Are you running any temp monitor programs like HWMonitor? If you're comfortable doing so you can open up the computer and check to see if the coolers are properly seated on the CPU/GPU, they could have gotten loose at some time. Also consider reapplying thermal compound to both of them.

 

Thanks for your reply. Once I get home I'll try that. I'm thinking it might be something else, however, because today when I plugged in the power jack to the back it made a popping sound... but I'm going to try the battery anyway.

 

Man am i glad I was wrong. Taking out the bios battery worked. Everything is back to normal... I still have no idea what caused the problem in the first place however. I have HWMonitor running right now, and its showing about 50c for the cpu and 41c for the gpu. I do not have LoL running. I am going to try to run LoL and see what happens. I wish I could make the fans run at 100% just as an added precaution.

 

Glad to hear you're getting it figured out. Fn + 1 (not F1) should make the fans kick up 100%. But your temps do look fine, double check under load.

 

That's a tad high for idle, but still certainly safe. As long as you don't hit low 90s and higher, it should be fine.