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

[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...