Dropped Laptop

T

Tac

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 3, 2006
Messages
192
my friend has a laptop that was dropped from about 3 feet a couple days ago and ever since has been giving the blue screen of death after 20 minutes. After the system is rebooted windows gives an error message saying the system has recovered from a critical error. he sent in and error report to windows troubleshooter twice and the first time it said he needed to update his driver (ATI mobile radeon x200) BUT the ATI site does not have new driver for that chip. The second report he sent came back with a RAM error. I was originally thinking it was being caused by the harddrive but now i'm not sure.
 
I suspect loose components. Maybe something got detached or unwired when it got dropped. But I doubt it. Laptops and computers in general are actually sturdier than you usually imagine. Personally, I've dropped my Dell Inspiron 2650 at least 5 times (2 of those being major falls) and have had nothing happen to it.
 
Check to make sure that the fans in the system are still functioning. If it crashes after 20 mins it could be heat related, if you feel comfortable, take it apart and poke around to see if anything is loose.
 
i can hear the fans and feel airflow coming out of the bottom of the laptop so I don't suspect overheating to be an issue. If it was my own laptop I might "poke around" but seeing as how it's my friends I wouldn't want to mess something up and later find out the fall didn't cause as much damage as I did.
 
Can speedfan read any temperature sensors? Even if the fan's are still running somewhat they might not be reaching thier maximum speed, or something may have obsctructed the airflow.
 
I don't think he has any type of program to monitor the fan speed or temps for the system. Is it something that can be downloaded or is it a program you purchase?
 
Speedfan works with most if not all desktop models, I'm not sure about laptops.
 
speedfan works on my HP laptop... it just assigns some really funky names to some of the fans and temps. that would at least tell you if something is not spinning or getting stupid-hot.
 
Surprised this hasn't been said earlier..

Your RAM was jarred. Re-seat it.

:p
 
Jellox said:
Surprised this hasn't been said earlier..

Your RAM was jarred. Re-seat it.

:p
Click to expand...

Yeah, this happened to me when I dropped my MacBook.

Probably the most common piece of hardware to be jarred besides the hard drive. It's best to check those immediately after a drop.
 
I guess that's something you wouldn't expect unless it's happened to you. I've added RAM to my laptops and they seem to be in there really tightly. I wouldn't expect them to come out by themselves.
 
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