Some Things Cannot Be Fixed

There are some critical laptop parts that are very difficult and expensive to fix. They include the motherboard and everything that is moulded on top of it, including the CPU (central processing unit) and the GPU (graphics processing unit). When you are sure that one of these are broken, proceed to the end of this article. For your next laptop, however, note that you can prevent damage of the CPU and GPU, by making sure they don’t overheat.

Operating System

Symptoms: If your laptop sounds perfectly normal, if the disk drive seems to be working, and if the display turns on, but the system just won’t boot all the way through, the problem may lie with the operating system.

Hard Disk Drive / Solid State Drive

Your hard or solid state drive is the home of your operating system and stores all of your data on the computer.

Symptoms: Hard drives don’t always fail out of the blue. Sometimes there are warning signs, including:

• slow / poor performance;
• frequent freezes;
• BSODs;
• corrupted data;
• accumulation of bad sectors;
• strange sounds.

CMOS Battery

The CMOS battery provides power for storing BIOS settings when the computer is turned off.

Symptoms of a bad CMOS: The laptop mostly boots up fine and everything appears to be normal, except for some petty issues:

• That the system time and date are constantly reset;
• drivers stop working;
• occasionally, the PC won’t boot or simply turns off;
• there is an elusive CMOS-related error while booting;
• and there are other weird hardware issues.

Any one of these issues can be caused by a number of things. But if a few of them coincide, then it’s a sure sign that your CMOS battery is failing.

 

RAM

The RAM is your computer’s short-term memory. It temporarily stores any information the system needs to run as it is running.

Symptoms of bad RAM:

• The laptop doesn’t boot and it might be beeping;
• BSODs while installing the operating system;
• random crashes or BSODs during normal operation;
• crashes while running memory-intensive programs.

 

Display

Until recently, I thought a display was almost impossible to fix. And then I dropped my laptop and my display was toast.

Symptoms: Other than obvious damage to the display, your display might not turn on at all. In this case, try to connect an external monitor, to exclude motherboard damage.