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

[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.