Is this the beginning of the end? (tech issue)
Diomede
Posts: 15,388
in The Commons
My laptop screen just lost about half of its brightness. I am getting by right now by connecting to an old stand-alone monitor. Is this the beginning of the end for my old laptop, which is now effectively a desktop?
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Comments
That depends on part availability and how techy you are. That's usually a sign the backlight is out/going out. Taking it to a big repair shop like Geek Squad (horribly overpriced) is likely to set you back as much as the cost of a new decent laptop. You might be able to find the part on Ebay, but you will have to dissasemple the screen on your laptop. On most models it's not really a difficult repair, just daunting if you've never done anything like it before.
I replaced a burnt out screen on my old laptop. Found the exact model on ebay being sold "for parts" at $20. Screen still worked so I just disconnected the whole laptop lid on both laptops so I didn't have to mess with the screen internals, and swapped them. Now my old laptop works just fine :)
When it becomes a placemat it's time is up.
Idiot me!
There was some sort of software update and it changed my default screen brightness setting to minimum. Had not noticed.
Yay for laptopocalypse being averted! Don't feel too bad about missing it, that's not something that an update should have messed with. And it's better than spending 3 hours trying to troubleshoot random power-offs on a machine that supposedly only had a malware infestations, as the supervisor of a repair shop, only to have one of your techs reach over and plug the power cable the rest of the way into the power supply. Turns out it was just barely hanging on and everytime I bumped the table it lost connection. Doh.
I'm still having trouble trying to figure out how to get my screen from shutting off on my HP Split 13 x2
I set the power option to do nothing when the lid is closed but it still blanks out the screen which dissables scrolling for some reason while I'm remoted into it.
*edit*
It's probably because the split is not a true laptop, it's a windows tablet with a clip-on keyboard
I've got a good one. I had the IT guy for the company come to my desk to check on my monitors that were not turning on. He switched out both of them before either of us realized that my tower also had no green light, and I had set my bag on the power bar under my desk and turned it off. D'oh.
I like my HP split, got a good price on it, but yeah, it is just a windows tablet. Still useful for drawing programs though.
I got a real good price on mine... Free! One of the IT guys at work tried to install windows 10 on it (It came with Win 8) but the install failed and they all thought it was bricked so they gave it to me.
I found the factory reset and got it restored, then proceded to properly update to windows 10 :)
... and this is why the first question from any tech support is...
Try unplugging it and plugging it back in. Not only forces you to check the power connection but, even with a desktop it forces a hard reboot typically restoring settings.
.
And those IT guys are hopefully not applying for jobs with the air traffic computers or nuclear control computers.
...better, The people at the old place I was living in up and abandoned a number of items. One was an Acer notebook with Linux on it. Need to get a charger brick (those are inexpensive these days) and I'lI have a fully functional Linux system for online purposes.