My laptop died, time to perform some surgery.

scanti

scanti

I've been away from the forums for about a week because my trusty gaming laptop decided to die on me. I had left my laptop on all night downloading XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Steam. In the morning I decided to have a quick play and when I started the game all I got was a screen of coloured squares.

A quick reboot and I tried Saints Row IV. This time the screen went blank and the laptop switched off. So I left my laptop to cool down, it had been on all night.

After about an hour I tried to switch my laptop on. Everything lit up and the hard drive whirred but no screen display. I connected my laptop up to my TV via HDMI and again no display. As a final act of desperation I connected my laptop to my TV using a VGA cable. Success, sort of. I got a display but it was corrupted.

WP_20131203_002.jpg

Messing about with the laptop I found that if I applied pressure to the keyboard, using a screwdriver, around where the heat sinks were I could get it to work long enough to boot into safe mode. However after a minute or two the screen corruption would come back and the system would crash.

WP_20131203_004.jpg

I decide that the problem could be one of four things:

The GPU was fried.
The GPU had become unseated from the motherboard.
The solder on the GPU had fatigued. (Solder can crystallize over time reducing it's conductive properties).
The thermal compound on the heat sink needed replacing.

I was hoping it was the last one as I would be able to fix it. So working on that assumption I decided to perform some laptop surgery.

WP_20131205_001.jpg

First I took it apart. Removed the gunk from the heat sink, reapplied the thermal paste and finally reseated the heat sink. I tried out my repaired laptop and, success, it worked!

WP_20131209_001.jpg

Now all I had to do was re-assemble it and hope everything still worked.

WP_20131209_003.jpg

So for about £10 I repaired my dead laptop and saved myself buying a new one for about £600. Yay!
 
Eye ZiS said:
I guess this is a good thing?
Click to expand...
Well since the repair I've had a couple of graphical glitches, so I'm not sure how long the repair will last. Hopefully it's just the thermal compound wearing it's way in. However it should give me enough time to save for a nicer laptop.
 
I hope you have all of your files stored on an external backup, just in case.
 
arkayn said:
I hope you have all of your files stored on an external backup, just in case.
Click to expand...

All the important stuff is backed-up to an external USB drive. I did have a RAID-5 NAS, thinking my data will be really safe there, until the controller board blew. The data was still intact, I just had no way of extracting it.

shitface said:
You should consider investing in one of those cooling pads for your laptop to prevent further overheat damage.

This is why gaming primarily on a laptop is a bad idea imo, they chronically overheat and you can't upgrade most of the components yourself as they are soldered onto the motherboard in most cases. Not a very good investment.
Click to expand...

Yeah I did start off having a desktop for gaming and a laptop for travel but the laptop was so convenient I eventually stopped using the desktop. In fact I pulled my old desktop out of the cupboard while the laptop was broken. It amazing that SRIV still runs on a 6 year old system. (Core 2 Duo, AMD 3870 graphics card).
 
Woot! Fixed my internet. Now to reply.

While I was reading your post and clickin' on the pics you provided I suddenly felt like Kramer From Seinfeld. It was When he went to go see Elaine's ex have surgery and he wanted to see how the doctor did it after seeing a show on tv about the very same procedure Elaine's ex was gonna have. None the less Reading this I can always come back to see how you managed to fix your laptop. If this ever happens to me.

So the only thing I got to ask is this. Jr. mint?
 
I must of missed or forgotten about that episode.

My laptop is sort of OK now. It's still running way too hot, the GPU is 80°c when it's idling. A laptop cooler knocks about 10°c off of that. I think the fan may need replacing. It looked like it was spinning OK but it's hard to tell. Either that or the heat damage is causing the chip to generate more heat.

Hopefully it will last me until March, by which time I should have enough saved to buy a new laptop.

I you do decide to do some hardware surgery here's some tips:

Try to find and download a service manual for your device.
Take photos and draw a diagram as you dismantle the device.
Use the right sized screwdriver for the screw you are unscrewing. (If it slips try a different sized screwdriver).
Buy a pill box to sort the different types of screws you remove.
 
shitface said:
You should consider investing in one of those cooling pads for your laptop to prevent further overheat damage.

This is why gaming primarily on a laptop is a bad idea imo, they chronically overheat and you can't upgrade most of the components yourself as they are soldered onto the motherboard in most cases. Not a very good investment.
Click to expand...

Not true. Clevo's and Alienware's have the amazing feature to be upgraded and have realy good cooling.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top