Laptop screen remains black, windows starts

Hello everyone at Major Geeks!

I have a 3-4 year old Asus G1 AK005C that up untill now has worked great with the exception of a free graphic card change made by ASUS within the 2 years of full on-site support.

The other day while playing a game (Warcraft III) it crashed, and upon restarting it (holding down the POWER button to kill it before turning it on again) the screen simply diden't turn on. I could hear windows starting, wireless network attempting to connect etc.

There is a function to turn off the backlight on my laptop which I have used many times to save power, but I also know that if I concentrate my eyes, I can see something on the screen dispite of the backlight being off, I can't now. It's completely black.

I plugged in another monitor and went into safe mode where a clone of the laptop screen appeared on my external monitor. This picture was clearly marked with the green/blue/purple vertical/horizontal lines (made up of small dots) that usually means the death of a graphic card.

Upon talking to ASUS support, I was told that if I pay aprox. 100 euro they would come get it, find out what is wrong and send it back. BUT if it is the screen that needs replacing, and the graphic card too it could be 550 euro ontop of the shipping/man hour payment of 100 euro.

I'd love to hear any thoughts on this matter.
-Self repair
-What exactly might be broken (Screen/graphic card/both?/something else?/inverter?)
-Anything.

I am very happy with my G1 and I'd like it back to full strength, though 650 euro...

Thank you for taking the time to read this/help!
- Martin

 

Greetings, MartinFL...

Well, that pretty much sums it up - you've bypassed your screen with another monitor, and still got the same results, so it's a sure bet your GPU or inverter is gone...unfortunately, that's a tough repair job, best handled by a dedicated OEM lab...

The only thing I can think of is checking to see if the GPU was overclocked somehow, which often results in screen artifacts...

I can think of no easy way to tell if your display is good or bad until you can clear up the graphics problem...