Laptop died...Possible to resurrect?

[Siryak]

Ok I have a laptop that is about 5 years old. It was working fine when all of a sudden the screen just went black. The fans are running and the screens backlight is coming on, but other than that it is pretty much dead. I opened it up and it looks like the fan ports were stuffed up with lint/dirt/etc., so it is probably heat damage. It is not booting because I have the power button programmed to Hibernate and it is just turning the computer off the instant I hit the power button.(Which it does before you boot into Windows) Since it is so old it is not worth spending any money on, but if there was something I could do myself I would be willing to try seeing as it is dead anyway. Besides gives me something to play with lol.

So any ideas of something I could try? Maybe fix it like they fix things on the Russian space station lol. (Movie Armageddon)

 

[Joe Average]

Best line in that movie:

AJ: "Haven't you ever heard of Evel Knievel?!?!?!"

Lev: "No, I never did see Star Wars..."

hehe Had me rolling big time. As for the laptop, well, good lord it could be a vast number of things. You say the backlight is coming on and the fans are spinning. Obviously the next thing to do is attach the laptop to an external monitor (it does have a VGA port I'm going to assume, especially if it's at least 5 years old) and see what you get out of it. You may need to press Fn (Function) + F8 about 10 seconds after you press the power button from a cold start. Some laptops, even Dells, don't give you the option to set which display is the primary one from the BIOS so... pressing Fn + F8 (usually it's F8 on a Dell to enable the external VGA port) will cause something to happen with the external output.

See what happens at that point and report back. If you end up deciding to just trash the laptop, I'll take it.