Broken Laptop

[brynndragon]

My laptop is misbehaving. It seems fine upon initial boot, but at some point the screen goes blank (it's not the screen, this happens with a regular monitor as well), the hard drive stops, and the computer ceases to respond. Sometimes it gets as far as the login screen, whereupon it flickers with each keystroke (like it has to think to figure out what to display in response to the keypress) and before I've managed to put in my entire password it goes blank. Occasionally after it's gone blank I convince it to show me something by hitting keys, and by something I mean the login screen but with trasnpositional errors (things no longer match up with each other, it's syncopated in the horizontal). Anyone have any idea what the frak is going on?

I'm really pissed off about this. It started happening after I got home last night from a day of playing WoW on it perfectly fine, and it came home in a padded-to-hell-and-gone laptop bag I just got, so I'm not sure how it could have sustained physical damage (if that's the problem). I even tried removing the new gig of RAM I'd put in it the day before, but that had no effect. It's got a 1-year parts and labor warranty, but I've had it for less than a month and it's already gone bad? The hell?

Comments

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

Sometimes a part will just go. Such as my motherboard in this machine.

Good luck.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll bring it by tonight to try to see if it's not something simple and/or we can figure out what's causing it, but chances are I'll be giving a call to the people I bought it from tomorrow.

[brewergnome.livejournal.com]

No gaming tonight. Robin and Scott are away on spring break.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Right. OK, I'll give ebuyshopping.com a call after seeing what happens if I try booting from the 180-gig.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

My guess would be that it's either a hard drive issue (and sadly they do occasionally die even when you buy the most expensive machine out there), or possibly a virus/spyware problem.

Do you know how secure the network and the machines on it were? Could your machine have been exposed to something that caused this?

I'd talk to the folks who sold you the machine and if they can do something about it then take advantage of their warranty on it, otherwise it might be necessary to pull the hard drive to see a) if it's physically ok, b) that it doesn't have something it shouldn't have on it. Either one of those possibilities could cause the behaviour your seeing, but on the plus side, both of those are relatively easy/inexpensive things to fix if necessary.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

The wireless network it's been is password-protected and all networks it's on have been firewalled. I ran a full scan via AdAware, Spybot, and Norton2004 (after getting the most recent update for all of them) on Friday, caught a few things but nothing horribly evil. But virii/spyware is tricksy and I can't absolutely rule it out. I got an external case for the 180-gig HD that's in my desktop PC and haven't taken the OS off it yet, so I can take out the laptop's hard drive, plug in the 180-gig, and it should just boot and run (I'm fairly certain it can boot from the USB port, since it tries to boot from just about anything plugged into it). We'll see how that goes when I get home from work.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

That's a good sign. The only reason I asked is that it is possible for computers on a firwalled network to pick up strange things from other machines on the same network. Frequently LANs are less restrictive with machines within than they are with machine's outside (so if someone on one of your networks has been lax in updates and virus scanning you can potentially pick something up simply by going onto the LAN they use).

If you have trouble booting from the USB drive, one potentially simple way to test your system is to boot up from a Linux Live CD (or a bootable Windows CD). I've had to salvage data from many laptops that had dying hard drives and using one of those CDs is a great way that I've found for checking the system in general. The boot-up process tends to be very descriptive and if there is a problem with any of your other hardware the Live CD would pick it up and even if it failed and couldn't boot you can often see with exactly which component it had problems.

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

I disagree with dragonvpm; given the "horizontal syncopation" you describe, my preferred diagnosis is a video card screwup. Since the video card is a part of the motherboard in most (all?) laptops, I'm pretty much in the same camp as brewergnome.

It's still under warranty? Great! Bring it back for service. Get them to make it right. But if you can get a picture of the screen first, please do; I want to see what you're describing.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I'll try to get a picture, but first I'll need to find a digital camera (I know, I'm a luddite ;P) and then I'll have to get the timing just right - it only appears briefly before the screen goes blank again.

I was afraid it might be the video card, considering the odd display, or the motherboard in general, which means it's warranty time. If they're smart they'll just send me one of the exact duplicates of my laptop that they have in the warehouse. Thankfully I don't have anything essential on the hard drive just yet.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

A hard drive slowly crashing (e.g. one of IBM's Deathstars) could show all the symptoms she saw (including "horizontal syncopation"). I've seen at least a half dozen Deathstars alone go out with varying degrees of quickness and they've all had odd display issues upon boot up. Usually if it's the video card or some other component it gets caught during boot up tests and the machine gives some sort of error message/beeps and it rarely continues trying to boot up.

In my experience if a machine can make progress booting up towards the login screen then it's often the hard drive that's begun failing and the output you see will vary in strange ways as the data that the drive is attempting to access (while booting etc...) becomes increasingly corrupted and un-useable.

By the same token it's also possible for something else to corrupt the data in such a way that the machine can't progress to booting up properly.

If nothing else, the hard drive is potentially one of the easiest things to test for in the event that the warranty service isn't up to par. It's easy enough to boot from a bootable CD in order to bypass a questionable drive.

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

I had something similar happen to my laptop; I figured it was some kind of thermal stress. I'd boot up and it would be fine for a while, then start getting progressively flakier. When I'd use one of those USB-powered laptop coolers I'd get more runtime before things went south... a sure sign.

Fortunately my laptop was still under warranty, so I just sent it back and they switched out the motherboard and everyone's happy now. I also now check to make sure it's not running before I stuff it in the backpack ;)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I thought of the possibility of thermal troubles myself, so I left it entirely off (not merely hibernating or whatnot) overnight and tried it again this morning. There was no observable difference, and it was pretty cold in the living room since we generally leave the thermostat set to 55 and only turn it up when we're actually in there. So I'm guessing it's not a thermal issue (too bad, the fix would've been relatively simple ;P).

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

So, I forgot your machine was broken (it's been a "funny" day), and went to play Civ. It worked fine, until I pressed on the left-hand side of the machine. Then it started going flakey again, so I shut it down. I could make the screen distort and undistort by applying slight pressure...Maybe it's a hardware issue?

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

The hard drive is on the left-hand side of the machine (IIRC), so that could be it. The screen is really easy to distort by touching it, as I discovered accidentally on Saturday (I can't tell from your comment if the slight pressure was applied to the screen itself or the keyboard or the palmrest or what).

I feel that it is a hardware issue myself, although I don't have logic or experience to back that feeling up. I'm going to try troubleshooting with the ebuy folks when I get home from work (oh, I think the reason it got here so quickly is they're located in Brooklyn - probably just sent a truck the whole way ;P). Unless externalizing the 180-gig is a really rapid process, in which case I'll try that first (so I can tell them "the hard drive is fux0red" if that corrects the problem). But if that doesn't fix it, I'm guessing it's the motherboard.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I squeezed your machine and the display got wonky, but the hard drive and rest of the computer continued working. That narrows my guesses down to:
1. your video (daughter)card is cracked
2. your motherboard is cracked
3. something is touching one of them and shorting
4. a connection in the chain motherboard -> video card -> LCD is loose or broken. Since your external monitor didn't work either (yes?) it's probably not the link between video and LCD -- though this goes through the hinge and is often a weak link, it wouldn't take the external video with it if it went.

I'm going with 4 as most likely...just because everything is succeeding in its self-test. (IIRC your laptop has hardware test software installed -- they might shed some light if you can get the display to hang around long enough to see the results of running them.)

There is really little chance it is the hard drive. But eliminating variables is good. Sliding your HD into the new enclosure should take 30 seconds. Extracting it from your old machine might take more time... But it'll probably be possible for you to back up the laptop before sending it back.

BTW, it was pressure on the left palm-rest; actually, any pressure that affects the flat-ness of the bottom half, so putting it on your lap vs. putting it on a table.

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

FWIW after quite a few laptop hassles in the past 18 months this would be my diagnostic process:

- try external monitor. If signal, then problem = laptop screen. If not, then suspect fan/cooling, HD, or motherboard.

- try leaving it off for 24 hours in a definitely not-hot place. If no change, rule out fan/cooling.

- try another laptop drive (if available), or booting from an external disk. If no change, problem = video card or motherboard.

Most laptops can't change the video card without changing the motherboard/systemboard. I've been told "replace the board" is in fact the most common laptop repair. 8->

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add:

So in other words you've already covered most of the decision tree and it's either the HD or motherboard. Hence the HD test is important...