Laptop boots past bios, Occasionally

Hi all,

Don't know if anyone could check out a laptop problem I was trying to fix for my friend over on the bleepingcomputer.com fourms, but I have hit a wall over there and have pretty much given up:cry.

Here is the link to my thread http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic250990.html or I can just repost the thing here but it is rather large and I wanted to avoid that.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

 

Hi and welcome to the forum,

Overall, I think the power/mainboard issue is most likely to be the problem here.

Your laptop does sound like it's getting too hot, have you tried opening it up and blowing out the dust and fluff from the ventilation routes and fans?

Your hard disk is suspicious, remove it and rerun Memtest overnight if you can, if not, forget it and stick to troubleshooting the laptop without it - use a LiveCD, UBD, Linux disc or similar instead. You may need to test each RAM stick in both slots to find a combination that works, I've seen RAM and RAM slots that were killed by too much heat in laptops.

I don't like the sound of the corrosion on the power lead connector, can you clean it?

 

Thanks for the reply.

I've cleaned the male leads of the ps cord as best I can but can't really get to the female contacts on the laptop itself. I also removed lots of dust from both fans and both heatsinks as soon as I got the laptop from my friend. Looked like a carpet in there but it still very forcefully blew air out the exhausts even while clogged (lots of fans for a laptop, sounds like a hoover).

I haven't tried running memtest without the hdd so I will try that tonight. I do know that the ram occasionally seems to be very touchy on which slots it will boot from. Usually requires both sticks each in a specific slot to show the bios screen at all or even think about making it to windows or a boot cd, but it has worked with each independently on occasion. Once the bios showed only 512mb while both sticks were installed (both seated correctly I had it open and checked), even made it all the way into windows that time.

If I do get memtest to boot reliably with the hdd out and one or the other sticks fails memtest while one passes should I try my hp hdd and the good stick or is this a faulty test idea?

 

Me neither!...

You should always be very careful leaving laptops plugged in overnight or unattended, but one that is having issues with the battery or connectors should be treated with extra caution.

edit: just take a look at this google search --> http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...q=laptop+bursts+into+flames&btnG=Search&meta=

 

If you can get a clean run of Memtest (7+ runs or overnight) on one stick of RAM, it may be ok to test the HDD again - BUT - I want you to try to get your drive connected to another PC and checked/data backed up first - a flaky power feed (like yours may be) could kill it.