Completely out of the blue, laptop has died. Help.. please?!?

P

PoppaJones

New Member
Hello all,

The story is quite short, so here goes. Last night I used my laptop computer as usual, and shut it down as usual. This morning I attempted to power up the laptop and was greeted by a blank screen. The hard drive was obviously not doing anything, as the machine was silent (albeit after an initial burst of fans). The power lights turned on, and if I held the power button down the machine turned off as usual. If I inserted a CD, the machine recognised it but nothing was displayed on screen.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this behaviour might occur? I was wondering as to whether the hard drive had possibly failed. If it is the hard drive, I can easily change it myself. However anything more complex and I may have to send it back for a service...

Thanks a lot for any help,
Lloyd
 
you see nothing on the screen at all ?

if yes, nothing, the inverter or the tiny flouresent tube in the display may have gone.

usually if it is the hd, you would still see the notebook boot and you would see some sort of an error message

connect a desk top monitor to the vid connector on the back of the notebook, there is a chance also it could be the mainboard also
 
Hi Viking,

I will try connecting a different monitor tomorrow. The only reason I don't think that it is the display (yet) is because I am getting no hard drive activity whatsoever, and if it was only the display that was at fault, I would expect the hard drive to be doing something.

Thanks for your help,
Lloyd
 
no drive activity, do you have a hard drive activity led ?
could be the mainboard.
try this
unplug the power supply
remove the main battery
flip the notebook over , take the ram out and put back in
reinstall all and see if she boots back up.
some notebboks also have a "reset" that you can actuate with a paper clip, see if your notebook has this.
 
Not sure if this will get noticed, but anyway, I put off opening up the laptop until I could find out whether this invalidated my warranty or not. When I phoned the manufacturer, the first thing they asked me to do was try removing/replacing the RAM. I did this, and the computer immediatly started working for a short time, then started failing again.

The difference this has made suggests that it is something RAM related. I have one 512mb RAM card, and so cannot easily test to see if it is the RAM card that is faulty. Later today I will try swapping the RAM card to the other port, to see if it is the port that is faulty. Has anyone else had this problem, and do you have any idea what I need to do?

Thanks!
 
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