Mysterious Laptop Problem

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Soldato
Joined
6 Mar 2008
Posts
8,799
Location
Leicestershire
Hi all,

I run my own PC repairs business but sometimes I send laptops off to a specialist repairers if they need resoldering etc.

So I did with one laptop which wouldn't display a screen, it had the onboard gfx chipset reflowed and was then sent back with them saying it was working.

So I dropped it off at my customers and 20 minutes later he rang me saying it had turned off...

So I picked it up and took it home, put it on and for 5 hours it was fine....

Then yesterday morning I turned it on again and after half an hour it turned off.

Just shutdown without any warning, instantly turned off.

Now the only difference is that on Friday night when it was on for 5 hours it was plugged in. I shut it down after 5 hours without a glitch.

Yesterday morning I decided to boot it up without it being plugged in...

But before it turned off the battery indicator was at the half way level.

I then thought "uh well it must be a problem with the battery" and then plugged it back into the mains, booted it up and about 5 minutes later it did the same thing again, just instantly powered off with no warning.

Has anyone encountered anything like this before.

I find it pretty mysterious considering it was fine for a whole 5 hours of intense(ish) benchmarking to try and make it turn off on friday night - bbc i player, and a few other apps being open at the same time...

Therefore it makes me think it can't be a RAM problem.... sounds like its more likely a battery problem - but then it now DOES turn off with the AC charger plugged in.

Any help would be great, sorry for the long post.
 
ooh this has been happening to my laptop, i had it repaired 5 times over psu issues and replaces and now its doing this, but i barely use it now because of the issues with it :confused:

I would love to know if you come on a solution to this too! I personally am looking at buying a laptop chassis and removing the parts i can and making my 'own' laptop as i have had so many problems with this chassis :(

Anyways a mate of mine who used to repair laptops said sometimes they just get clogged up with dust and need a damn good cleaning out, could it be that?
 
My first thought is over heating which is common with laptops.

Take it apart and clean any fluff out the heatsink.
 
I agree with J.B, laptops are fantastic, but with a lot of components packed into such a confined space, heat is always an issue. A lot of laptops eventually give in to the heat, and poorly manufactured components may just fail.
Normally with laptop screens it comes down to the inverter or the bulb itself, but this issue doesnt seem to be anything like that.
Does the laptop actually shutdown after the screen goes black, or does the screen itself only fail?
Im thinking, as the board heats up, the board itself can bend, and bending can dislodge some components, this is the major problem on the X-BOX 360, where Microsoft use the terrible X-brackets, which don't help against board bending, which go onto dislodge CPU and GPU's easily, causing red rings of death.
 
thanks for the help, not sure if it is a heat issue myself though...

it was on for a solid 5 hours with lots of apps thrown at it on friday night and didnt turn off at all...

but on saturday morning it lasted 20-30 minutes and shut itself off... when it happens everything goes off, hdds, lights and screen all go out (which seems a like a heat shutdown i know)...

the other thing is my customer didnt mention anything about it randomly turning off, yet when it came back after being fixed its started doing this... the problem initially being that the screen wasnt working, but now it seems like tehres a whole new problem altogether. baffling me :confused:
 
Does sound like an overheating issue like others have said, best bet would be to just run occt or similar on it. Maybe the fan wasn't plugged back in by mistake when putting the laptop back together?

Also did you try running the laptop on mains, without the battery in to see if there was a problem with the battery.
 
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