Replaced Cmos Battery, Black Screen

I'm not sure whether this is primarily hardware or software. Flip a coin and start here.

SYSTEM: Toshiba P875-S7102, ten years old, laptop, WIN 10 Pro. Has been my music computer for several years - AbleTon, Audacity, several other software MIDI handlers, hundreds of gigs of data on a 1TB SDD. I've already copied all that to an external, so it's not a total disaster, but I'd still really like this old thing to run again.

I almost always leave this computer sleeping when done for day. Maybe once every month or so do I shut it down. A few weeks ago, for no good reason, I shut it down. The next morning - nothing. I'm not sure, but I think the power button light came on, but nothing else happened.

I tried the usual quick hits - boot with and without battery and wall power - still nothing. The CMOS battery is usually the next step, but it turned out to be a large one, as that battery is on the motherboard, I think - I had to take it all the way down to find the battery, which turns out to be soldered. I don't even try to solder anymore - I can't see very well and have a really hard time steadying a tip on a very small space. I let it sit for a while - I would have taken it to a repair shop, but the nearest one is about 150 miles, so there the laptop sat for a couple more weeks. Last Friday, I took it to a local shop that I thought was only phones, but my son told me they work on tablets and laptops, too.

I explained the above to the tech, and I really did have all the fasteners. I showed him the three ribbon cables that needed attaching, and one little two-wire with a connector, and told him to solder the new battery in, and see of he wanted to put it back together. He said sure. Today he called and said all was in and it still was doing the exact same thing, i.e. nothing - black screen, that's all.

It was - and is - my assumption that the BIOS needs to be re-programmed, although I would have expected a default set of data to be used, and at least get into BIOS setup.

Any ideas?

 

10 years is a good run. I suspect something else has died.

It would be extremely odd and a rare event for the BIOS firmware to need to be "reprogrammed". Even if your current BIOS somehow became corrupt (again, a rare event), the system should at least try to boot. A black screen could just indicate a problem with the graphics solution or the monitor screen, but if that were the case, you should still feel and hear the cooling fan(s) and drive motor spinning. If you hear nothing, then I am afraid the computer has finally given up the ghost.

If you do feel the fan and drive spinning, you could try connecting an external monitor to the laptop, then pressing the appropriate Fn + F-key combination to switch the video output to the external monitor and see what happens. Sorry, but there is no industry standard for Fn keys. But on my old Toshiba (which finally died after nearly 11 years of quality service), it was Fn + F5. If you don't have a monitor, most TVs made in the last 10 years or so support computer input.

But again, 10 years is a good run so you should not be upset, especially since you were able save your data.

 

Yeah, I had installed that SDD in it a couple of years ago, and its file system is intact. It's just kinda weird that it was running fine, no problems at all... and poof! It was connected/duplicated to an external HDMI 23" touchscreen, but I don't think I saw anything on that when I was trying to get it to come up. Damn, I was hoping the cmos would be happy with a fresh battery.

Hey, thanks for the response, I do appreciate it.

 

Can you hook up an external monitor?

 

Just saw this. Yes, it has been running for the last few years with a 23" HP touchscreen on HDMI, duplicate with laptop screen. Still black-screened. The power light comes on and stays on, and if left on will warm up enough to start the fan.

I'm kind of thinking some sort of motherboard chip failure.

Thank you for replying.

 

As suggested in post #2 above, if both the laptop and external monitor show the black screen, then the problem is in the laptop itself. And the specs for that Toshiba show it uses integrated graphics (no separate graphics card) which indicates either the CPU (with its integrated GPU) has failed, or the motherboard's supporting graphics circuitry has failed.

Either way, with the age of the computer, it is not worth having it repaired. Just arbitrarily replacing the CPU (if you can find a compatible CPU) would be expensive, even if successful. And if not the CPU, the labor hours troubleshooting and repairing the motherboard, to include the replacement parts, would not be economically feasible either. And then, you would still have a 10 year old computer where any one of 100s of other aging components could fail at any moment.

My advice is to open the laptop, remove the hard drive, attach it to another computer using a suitable adapter, and copy off any files you don't want to lose.

And the good news is, you now know what to ask Santa for for Christmas.