Hello,
I have several older laptops that were being tossed by their previous owners. They’re from the late XP to early Win7 era. Being used to trouble shooting PCs, I thought I might get a few up and running either for my own uses or for the poor (I personally know one family that would appreciate one). My problem is that many of them have black screens or the screen powers up but never shows anything.
None of the laptops give me beep codes – even the ones who’s LEDs power on for only a few seconds before turning off. What’s going on here?
I tried plugging in a known good VGA monitor into these laptops, but so far none of the ones with broken screens give me a signal – even when obviously in BIOS. It’s so weird. Any ideas?
A lot of things could be wrong, but the reality of laptops is that they are very similar to SBCs in that most of the major components are soldered to the board and one it fails there isn’t much that can be done without some pretty significant surgery. Regardless when troubleshooting any PC the steps are always the same and you always start in the same place. Strip down every unnecessary component you can from the machine and work through a process of elimination.
Umm, laptops tend to be both minimalistic and highly integrated by design. The most I could “strip” from them are their HDDs and optical disk drives.
I was particularly, asking if there was something IDK about laptops and beep codes and laptops and screens. Like, if the laptop powers up to BIOS, then I should get a display via an externally attached monitor, right? Likewise, if it obviously fails to POST (but still powers up), I should get some kind of beep code, right?
If they were desktops, I’d place a different monitor on them and/or GPU. But that’s not possible here.
I also have a PCI card which will give me the BIOS code numbers, but I can’t plug that into a laptop.
I’m working in a “black box” scenario and trying to figure out how to get data out of the machine so I can figure out what’s going on.
Which is exactly my point. Take out the HDD/SSD and replace it with a known good one, take the RAM down to a single stick (or replace the single stick with a known good sample), remove the wifi adapter, etc…
Removing all the ram or the hdd should be enough to cause a system error. No hdd should give an on screen prompt about no boot device / insert disk to boot next available boot option.