• Video card (I think) dying?
    5 replies, posted
I'm posting this for a friend of mine (who doesn't have a Facepunch account) She has been having a problem for a few months with her laptop. Sometimes (seemingly) randomly, and sometimes when booting up, shutting down, or watching video, the screen glitches up and the system hangs. No BSOD or anything, and she didn't see any error messages after booting back up (at least in Windows, don't think she's looked in Ubuntu). She doesn't have the money right now to buy or even build a new computer, so we'd rather figure out what's wrong and try to replace that component (if possible. It IS a laptop, and I don't know how easy it is to upgrade them). Are there any stress tests that would help find out what's causing it, and if so, would running them damage anything even more if it's already failing? [URL="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1177504/bootup.wmv"]Video of it happening. It used to be different, like part of the screen tiling across the rest of it, but recently it's just been like this. (Or should I upload this to Youtube instead?)[/URL] Specs: It's an HP Pavilion dv6000 Windows 7 x32 (build 7100) - though this also happened on Ubuntu (9.10?), so I doubt it's a software problem 1GB RAM AMD Turion 64 X2, 1.8GHz NVidia Geforce Go 6150 (integrated)
It's an integrated graphics thing, which mean there is no video card in there. It's the motherboard/cpu. It's just a bad laptop really, don't know any other way to put it.
Oh. Well, thanks. Unfortunately the warranty doesn't cover it anymore, so is there any way to replace a laptop CPU? (or even motherboard, though I'd think it'd be easier to replace a CPU. I've never worked with laptop hardware much.) ... Or at least, a way to find out which of those is bad.
One megabyte ram? What the shit. You clearly must mean 1 GIGAbyte.
Yes, I did. Oops. (fixed)
Tell her she's fucked and rather then building a new system or laptop either get it fixed at cost or buy a netbook. Laptop repair is best done by people who can get their hands on new parts, the only other way to try to buy parts off ebay. Even then you'd have to get lucky because you need the exact same parts (obviously working parts).
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