Today I was able to fix a “dead” notebook simply by reseating connectors. The customer brought in Compaq nx5000 notebook with the following complaint:
“Laptop shuts down on power up. When the power button is pushed, the laptop flashes green lights for several seconds and then powers down. Unit will not stay on with battery or when plugged in”.
I plugged the AC adapter and tried to turn on the laptop. After I pushed on the power button, fans started spinning and were active for a few seconds and laptop just turned itself off. The video never came on. I tried to power it on for a few times with the same result.
Here is how I fixed it.
First of all I tried simple stuff: remove the battery and start the laptop with AC adapter plugged in, reseat and swap the memory module, remove the hard drive, the DVD drive, the wireless card. Nothing helped to start the laptop normally. After that I went a little bit further. I opened up the laptop case, removed the LCD screen assembly and reseated the video card and… Surprise, surprise, the laptop started fine with an external monitor attached. Just in case I restarted it 3-4 times and each time I got video on the screen. After I assembled everything back, one more surprise was waiting for me. The laptop failed to boot again with the same symptoms. So, the only part that I added before it failed was the LCD screen assembly. I unplugged the video cable from the system board and the laptop started fine again with the external monitor. Now I know that the problem is somewhere inside the display assembly (of course, if the video connector on the system board is fine). The next logical step would be opening up the LCD display assembly and check if all connectors are seated properly. Bingo!!! I wasn’t very surprised, but I was very happy. The video cable was half-way out from the connector on the back of the LCD screen. The laptop started perfectly fine as soon as I plugged the video cable back in place. Fixed!
That was my first experience when improperly plugged video cable prevented entire system from booting.
Read more:
How to troubleshoot and fix laptop video problems
June 10th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I have an NX9420. I bought it new, about 2 years ago. I recently replaced both the battery and power supply (I’m on my third one), both about 1 month ago. The p/s seemed a little light for this machine but it “supposedly” is supposed to work with the unit.
Recently (last day or so, some funny things have been happening at startup, including the startup-5 seconds-shutdown with no video screen at all). Now, this morning, that’s all I get, though, I got the hp logo once. I have tried starting it with only the p/s, battery to no avail. have reseated the hard drive, and about ready to reseed the memory and see if any of this has an effect.
Someone told me that there’s been a lot of issues with included wifi internal card, causing this behavior, but would it just all the sudden surface after 2.5 years of ownership?
June 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am
My son has a IBM Thinkpad T41. Unfortunately, he knocked it to the ground a few days ago, about a distance of 12 inches. Now when we turn it on the screen is slightly black with a strip of blue at the top and the lights flash and go out…I can hear the fan, but it sounds weak, like it is struggling to power up. After a few days we tried it again and everything booted up fine. It then worked for about 10mins then shutdown but the fan continued to work but humming noise was coming and going (very difficult to explain). When I try to start it up, again I get the black screen with blue stripe. Could the fan be damaged? Causing it to overheat, hence it shutting down? HELP! Thanks in advance for any advice.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Hi, I have an HP6000 that won’t start. When I press the power button, the fan starts, the blue ‘wireless turned on’ light comes on, followed by the ‘charging’ lamp (psu plugged in or on battery) then it all shuts down after a second or two, nothing on the screen. I’ts twice tried to start normally with the screen active but then it just cuts dead, but with the cpu fan still running.
I had been using it and it all just went off, no shut down or anything, it just went off. I was running on slow cpu mode, and nothing was hot at the back so I know its not a heat related issue.
Any ideas what up?
Cheers! Clivey :-))