Laptop Troubleshooting and Repair - Toshiba, Dell, HP, Thinkpad, Acer and Sony laptops

The first step in repairing any laptop or notebook is troubleshooting the problem accurately. For example, some people will run out and buy a new battery on the assumption it's failed when the problem is a frayed wire or a bad connector on the power cord, something that can be fixed with a little solder or electric tape. Likewise, a "dead" LCD screen could be a mainboard or video adapter failure, a bad inverter or a burnt out backlight. When the LCD itself needs replacing, it will probably be due to a physical crack in the glass or blocks of dead pixels. If your CD or DVD drive won't work anymore, make sure you've tried a selection of discs and try a cleaner kit before replacing the drive, and always double-check the connection before discarding the old drive. About the only problems that will identify themselves as imminent failures are increasingly loud hard drives or steadily decreasing battery life over time. The six troubleshooting flowcharts below are linked to the full size troubleshooting flowcharts and text excerpted from "The Laptop Repair Workbook. "

Power Failure
If your laptop doesn't turn on when you hit the power button, the power system is a logical place to begin the troubleshooting process. The laptop power system can be viewed as three separate parts: The A/C adapter that gets plugged into a power outlet on one end and into the laptop on the other end, the laptop motherboard or power regulation daughter card that monitors and distributes power to the laptop components, and the battery. The vast majority of laptops manufactured these days can operate without the battery installed. In some cases, the manufacturers will suggest that you remove the battery and store it somewhere cool if using the laptop in one location for extended periods of time, as in weeks or months.
One of the oddities about troubleshooting laptop power failure as opposed to PC power failure is that the battery gives the laptop an independent power system for as long as the charge lasts. If the PC in your home is plugged into a bad power outlet or its power strip is accidentally switched off you'll quickly figure out why. But if the power strip gets turned off while you are operating your laptop, or a breaker trips, or the local power grid suffers a brown out, you might not even notice until the battery runs down. That's why it's important to not jump to conclusions about laptop battery failures, and to try charging the battery under different conditions before giving up and buying a new one. Just because the battery didn't charge while the laptop was plugged in doesn't mean the battery is bad.

Expand laptop power troubleshooting flowchart

There's very little difference between troubleshooting a Dell Latitude, Toshiba Satellite, Sony Vaio, IBM Thinkpad, HP Pavilion (and Compaq) or even an Apple Powerbook or iBook. The basic designs of all of these laptops are the same, even if one model uses an Intel CPU, another an AMD,a third a PowerPC and a fourth a low power Transmeta. A technician troubleshooting Toshiba laptops may be more like to start with the battery, as they are notoriously weak, just as troubleshooting HP and Compaq notebooks often begins with the RAM. However, it's a mistake to approach any notebook problem with a pre-conceived notion of the outcome rather than following a logical process of elimination. Just because one model of Dell tends to blue blotches on the screen when it ages doesn't mean that Dell kept manufacturing notebooks with the same problem. IBM and Sony and Apple laptops have generally been viewed as the higher quality than the more popular brands, but they all suffer similar failures due to overheating, wear and tear, and the occasional run of bad components.

New laptops are equipped with Lithium Ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are much lighter and don't require any special behavior on the part of the laptop user. However, they have a higher internal resistance which makes them prone to overheating at a high rate of discharge, so they have to be equipped with more sophisticated monitoring circuitry. There have also been a series of manufacturing problems with these Li-ion batteries that have led to recalls due to fire risk. One other negative characteristic of Li-ion batteries is they lose capacity, whether you use them or not, at a rate of 15% or 20% per year. If you are having problems with a Li-ion battery, the first step is always to check on the manufacturer website to see if it has been recalled.
The first step in troubleshooting battery life or charging problems is to check your owner's manual or the manufacturer's website for how to interpret the status LEDs on the laptop or the battery itself. Some batteries come equipped with built-in LEDs and a button you can press that will roughly display the battery charge by the number of LEDs lit, or show an error state, usually indicating that the battery needs to be replaced. On other models, the LEDs on the laptop will change color or blink when there's a charging problem. In either case the operating manual for the laptop or a search of the manufacturer's web site should tell you exactly what the LEDs are indicating. They won't be right 100% of the time, since batteries are tricky beasts, but you aren't taking a big gamble if you trust them.
Expand laptop battery troubleshooting flowchart

It pays to go online and read the owners manual for extending the life of the battery in your particular laptop model if you didn't do so when you obtained it. Some older notebooks require that you cycle the battery continually, only working on AC power for as long as it takes to recharge the exhausted battery. Many newer models want you to fully discharge the battery around once a week, but otherwise don't care about leaving it plugged in the rest of the time, and newest designs don't care what you do as long as the laptop actually gets run on battery for a reasonable percentage of the time. If you think your battery is running down too fast, make sure you have enabled the aggressive power saving modes in software (usually accessed through Control Panel or the manufacturers icon) which dim the screen, slow the CPU, and let the hard drive spin down when unused. Also, keep in mind that the level of estimated battery life remaining that causes an onscreen alarm can be set by the user, and if your default setting is very conservative (between 10% and 20%), you may want to experiment with a lower level (between 3% and 5%) that will still give you time to save your work and shut down before the laptop goes into hibernation.

Video Failure
Assuming that the video processor on the motherboard is working properly and sending the LCD instructions as to which colors to allow through in which screen points (pixels), the most common failure for laptop displays is a dead or intermittent inverter. When you can only see a very, very faint image of your operating system desktop on the screen, it means that the video system is working, but the LCD isn't getting any backlighting. The usual culprit if you don't have an LED backlight is the inverter, especially if you didn't note any strange tinting to the laptop display in recent operation, but it's not easy for the do-it-yourselfer to determine with 100% accuracy whether the failure is the CCFL lamp or the inverter.
Some display problems aren't difficult to troubleshoot at all. If you notice an inky stain slowly spreading across your LCD over days or weeks that you can't wipe off, the LCD itself is failing. Dead and stuck pixels often appear on LCDs over time causing point failures in the display. There's nothing you can do to fix them, so just tolerate them if possible. If the laptop is fairly new, the LCD may be under warranty and the manufacturer normally has a specification for how many dead pixels a LCD can accumulate before they have to repair it. Other physical problems that may require LCD replacement are cracks and chips on the surface. Horizontal or vertical lines or swathes of either a single color or dead pixels usually mean the LCD will have to be replaced.
Expand LCD display troubleshooting flowchart

If the external monitor works fine, your failure is with the laptops video subsystem, which is usually contained entirely in the screen/lid assembly. There is a decent chance that one of the cable bundles (video signal or power) that run through the hinges to the video subsystem has failed, so unless the failure is obvious (cracked screen, fading in a corner, faint image, bad pixels), you should still open up the main body of the laptop as well to visually inspect the connections. The easiest problem to identify is obviously a cracked LCD, but a slowly increasing number of dead spots or whole rows or columns on the screen indicates the the actual LCD assembly is bad. Replacing the LCD is pretty much the same on most notebooks, Dell has a nice backlight design, the real challenge is getting the lid open and removing it without breaking anything.

Laptop Fan Failure
Increased fan noise may be your first indication that your laptop is running on the hot side. It can be extremely irritating to work on a laptop with a loud fan that frequently cycles on and stays on for extended periods. A well designed laptop with good power management should be almost silent in normal usage, with the exhaust fan becoming audible only during periods of intensive computation. Fan speed is also controllable, so a well designed laptop will run the fan just fast enough to keep the temperature in the ideal operating range. However, some manufacturers go overboard on packing in high performance components to create a power laptop in the "desktop replacement" style, and these monsters tend to run hot even when they are in new condition. Go online and read some customer reviews of your laptop when you first suspect overheating. If the reviews include a common thread, like "the left side of the keyboard becomes too hot to type after fifteen minutes," it means your laptop was poorly engineered.

Expand laptop overheating troubleshooting flowchart

Hard Drive Failure
Fortunately, laptop hard drives are the one really generic part (aside from most memory) that you don't have to worry too much about replacing. I just pricewatch or call dirtcheapdrives and buy the closest capacity match, which is usually somewhat larger. Depending on the model, you may be able to really upgrade to a much bigger drive on a replacement, but you probably won't get the benefit of a faster interface on an older notebook and the BIOS may not recognize most of the capacity, so there's no point in spending much more than you have to. Laptop hard drives can be extremely easy to replace or moderately difficult. The difference lies in how they are accessed. Many older notebooks allow you to replace the hard drive through a single-screw access panel on the bottom of the unit, sometimes it's right under the battery or the RAM. Other laptops require that you crack the body open, remove the keyboard or the motherboard (assembly varies from manufacturer to manufacturer), really take the whole thing apart. The interface for the IDE cable on the drives that come out easy is often fixed in place, so the drive basically plugs in, while the drives that require you to take the whole thing apart often make remove the connector on a flexible (and fragile) flat cable before removing the drive. Laptop hard drive replace is generally so easy that I recently talked a friend through the the harder kind, with the hard drive under the keyboard, by way of a couple e-mails. He was so pleased that he decided to replace the keyboard for $8 while he was at it since many of the keys labels were worn off.
Expand hard drive and boot troubleshooting flowchart

Ports and Power Connector
Laptops are sometimes plagued by internal failure of the physical connectors, like the modem or network port seems to be detached within the case, making it tough to get a good connection, or the power connector solder joint to the board breaks. The only way to fix these problems is to open up the body of the laptop, determine exactly what has broken, and do your best to restore it to the original condition, rather than just kludging it. The problem with kludging anything in a notebook is that the tolerances are so tight that your kludge might fail as soon as you snap the case back together. When soldering anything on a laptop board, use a fine tip iron and don't gamble on overheating the board and stripping away circuitry. Use a decent solder sucker to quickly clean up the old solder rather than fooling around with copper wick, and if you get the feeling you're taking to long, just stop and let it all cool down before trying again.

Wireless Internet Connectivity
People new to wireless computing often confuse WiFi technology with cellular phone technology. The wireless capability built-into laptops is known as WiFi, and is defined by the IEEE standard for networking, (802.11b/g/n and sometimes y), where "b" is an older, slower standard, and "g" is the most widely used. Faster and more powerful versions, "n" and "y" have been defined for some time but were only implemented in laptop hardware very recently. WiFi technology relies on low power transceivers built-into both the laptop and the modem/router that brings high speed Internet into your home or workplace. WiFi may also be transmitted through stand-alone routers or repeaters (access points) that are hard wired to a high speed network. The range of the current WiFi networks is very low, on the order 100ft (30m) within a structure, depending on the construction, and not more than a few hundred feet (100m) in the open air.
Not surprisingly, the first problem most new laptop owners encounter with trying to connect to a wireless network is that their WiFi has inadvertently been switched off. The next most common problem is that the signal strength is too weak to hold a connection. This can be extremely confusing if the network is working fine for a person sitting at the next table, but that laptop might have a more sensitive receiver, be set in just the right location, or even be accessing a different network. When you're troubleshooting a wireless connection, it makes sense to get as close to the router as you can, certainly in the same room if it's in your own home, so you can eliminate signal strength as a possible issue.
Expand wireless internet troubleshooting flowchart

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