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.

[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.

[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.

[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 ;)

[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?

[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->