| From: Jonathan Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | I attempted to turn on my laptop one morning to be met with a | scrambled screen: | http://plasmoidia.homelinux.com/users/jonathan/hp_pictures/display/
Yikes! I wonder what could be wrong. It looks as if 1/2 of the vertical stripes are correct and the other half are wrong in some way. Perhaps you can figure out what is going on from the pattern. I cannot make out the pattern from your picture. Whatever is wrong, it isn't too drastically wrong. Apparently a lot of the video chain is working. I don't think your RAM is bad for a couple of reasons. Even so, if you have two sticks, try each alone. Maybe your RAM is bad. How many sticks do you have? If two, try each alone. If chips were in sockets, I'd say that you should try reseating them. But I don't think much is in sockets these days. When an Atari ST computer started to get flaky, I sometimes found that the "Atari Twist" helped. This is hard to explain without a picture. Here's the best I've found from a quick google: http://www.ephotozine.com/forum/viewanswers.cfm?qid=23709 Have you ever heard of "the Atari twist" Ellis? This was a way of reseating chips. Grip the board in both hands (as if you were carrying a tray), and gently try to twist it. Any socketed chips tend to move in their sockets removing the oxidation. Supposedly, Atari STs were notorious for this problem. I've never had to do this to an Atari, but I have done it to one Amiga 500 though. I'd add: - Probably best done to the keyboard portion, with the laptop open (I don't mean disassembled, open as if for use.) - Don't use enough force to break, but use enough to cause mechanical flexing (the whole point). - Twist both ways. - Perhaps a couple of times. You could even try twisting while it is on to see if it makes a difference. My intuition is that this experiment is only useful if you've gooten past the won't-boot stage to the curdled-screen stage. | I was able to boot up into Linux and then Windows and grab most of the | files that I wanted from it. The laptop is now about a month out of | warranty, and even if it wasn't, I don't know what would be available | given that they do not make this computer anymore. I think that they stock spare parts for a number of years. But they apparently charge a lot for repairs. Does not hurt to try phoning support to see where you get -- they might be able to diagnose the problem. | The problem seems | to be a hardware problem with the video card, since the scrambling | occurs in the BIOS too. That suggests the problem is not RAM: I think that the BIOS uses the frame buffer in a quite different way. On the other hand, in your third picture, the plain text messages "Press <Esc>..." look intact. I'd be tempted to see what happened if you boot into some pure-text console mode (not the "frame-buffer console"). Got a DOS boot dis? Or Tom's Root Boot floppy? Is there still a way to boot WinXP into something console-base (like DOS)? Your fourth picture suggests that the scrambling is on video-out too. So it isn't an LCD panel problem. | It's back together now, and I don't think the disassembly did any | harm. Though, the laptop will not boot now (it did at least once | after "surgery"). It seems to get stuck trying to initialize the | video or something (backlight comes on, nothing else), something that | I saw sporadically before I took it apart, but is rather persist ant | now. This sounds like a more ominous symptom. If you power cycle often enough, does it eventually show more life? Can you hear anything going on as it starts to boot? Floppy, CD, or HD noise? Of course some of those noises may not be from CPU-initiated actions. | Anyone have any ideas about what might could be done to resurrect the | machine? I haven't looked for this, but ebay seems to have partial laptops and laptop parts. I'm not confident enough to fiddle inside a notebook except when desperate, so I don't really know your chances of success. Good luck! Keep us up to date on your progress. _______________________________________________ LinuxR3000 mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pcxperience.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000 Wiki at http://prinsig.se/weekee/
