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Re: Strange PC Video Fault

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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On 02/08/2024 15:01, NY wrote:
>
> On 02/08/2024 00:21, Java Jive wrote:
>>
>> As I did not dare to try to disconnect the screen end of the cable, 
>> because it looked complicated and was covered with "Don't touch!" 
>> stickers, but I did remove and replace the motherboard end, my best 
>> guess now is that the motherboard end of the cable, through a process 
>> of heating up and cooling down, had walked itself partly out of its 
>> connecting socket.  Supposedly this should have been prevented by it 
>> being held in place by sticky tape, but maybe that allows some creep 
>> when it warms up.
>>
>> However that may be, hopefully when the replacement plastic arrives 
>> I'll be able to restore the laptop to a fully working state.

Arrived today, laptop now fixed, all seemingly well, at least for the 
moment I have 'feature'-free display.

As for what follows, yes, I agree completely.

> Good luck with getting the screen working again. There was a time when 
> laptops were assembled in a way that made it easy to disassemble them.
> They had little access doors, held in place with a single screw, to get 
> at the RAM DIMMs, the hard drive, and to slide out the CD or DVD drive. 
> If you did need to remove the whole "lid", it was held on by lots of 
> very obvious screws on the underside. The battery was held in place by a 
> couple of slide locks and could be removed and replaced with a new one 
> in a few seconds. You didn't have to use a spudger to release plastic 
> spring-clips, or have to remove the keyboard to get at screws hidden 
> underneath.
> 
> But nowadays everything is fitted for life, and there is no expectation 
> that the owner or a repair technician can swap out defective parts as 
> they could with a desktop PC. When (not if) my present laptop battery 
> stops holding its charge, goodness knows how I will get to the battery 
> to replace it. The underside of the laptop only has two screws at one 
> corner, so unless *all* the screws are hidden under the rubber strips 
> that constitute the feet, then everything is held in place by clips or 
> by screws that require access from the keyboard side.

The entirety of the bottom plate of the Dell Precision M6700s is held in 
by 2 screws + a raft of metal tongues.  To remove it, you take out the 
battery, undo the two screws, and then slide the cover about 2-3 mms 
forward or backwards (I can't remember which, and they're both running 
just now, so I don't want to disturb them) which frees the tongues and 
and the entire bottom can be just lifted away, revealing 2 of the 4 RAM 
slots, the other 2 are under the keyboard, the fans, the card slots, and 
the HD mountings -  a *HUGE* improvement on both this Inspiron and the 
older Precision M6300s.

Both the Inspiron and the Precision M6300s have reasonably accessible 
RAM and HDs, and the M6300s also have easily accessible card slots, but 
there ends convenience of upgrade or repair for either.

With the Inspiron, you have to take the palm-rest off to get at the 
card-slots, or rather, mostly, the single slot, because in that model 
Dell were so mean that they didn't actually include the second-slot 
unless you specifically ordered a model with a card-style SSD  -  on the 
other models, the vast majority, the circuitry seems all to be there for 
the second slot, but they decided to save a few fractions of a cent by 
not having the second slot soldered into its place on the daughterboard. 
  So, even if you were willing and able to go to the trouble of a 
near-complete dismantling of the PC to upgrade it with a card SSD, you 
couldn't, unless you were also willing to try your hand at soldering the 
second slot into place, or else were lucky enough to be able to find a 
replacement daughterboard with the 2nd slot, which seem to be as rare as 
hens' teeth.

The Precision M6300's fans tend to get very noisy when they get old, as 
do the Inspiron's single fan, though for me at least its noise was 
rather more bearable than the other, but, despite the fact that fans are 
moving parts and therefore a need to change them is absolutely 
predictable, with both a near-complete dismantling of the laptop is 
required to do so.

The Inspiron has been particularly bad in this respect, the laptop 
equivalent of the Citroen GSA models which cost a fortune in garage fees 
because everything was so densely packed under the bonnet that you 
couldn't do anything without removing something else first.  Hopefully 
never again will I have ever to work on either!

> I do PC repairs for a living but I won't touch laptops if it's a 
> hardware problem that requires the back to be removed, because of fear 
> that I will break some fragile clip. Let some other poor sod attempt 
> that work!
> 
> In the "olden days", if a laptop failed to boot, a last resort was to 
> remove the HDD, connect it as a slave drive via a USB-to-SATA or 
> USB-to-IDE caddy interface, and read the user files in 
> c:\users\<username> once Windows had gone through the lengthy "take 
> ownership" process - assuming the user hadn't encrypted the drive. But 
> if you can't get at the HDD, you're stuffed.

Yes, and, one of the stupidest ever defaults of most recent versions of 
Windows, if you get a bluescreen it's been and gone before you can 
possibly read it as the laptop goes into an endless cycle of rebooting 
-  the only way you can read the details on the screen is to video it 
with a mobile phone and try, probably several times before you are 
lucky, to freeze the playback at exactly the right moment to be able to 
read it.  That most stupid of defaults is always one of the first things 
I change on any new installation of Windows.

-- 

Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website: 
www.macfh.co.uk

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Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-07-31 13:22 +0100
  Re: Strange PC Video Fault sticks <wolverine01@charter.net> - 2024-07-31 08:30 -0500
  Re: Strange PC Video Fault Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2024-07-31 09:54 -0400
    Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-07-31 20:09 +0100
  Re: Strange PC Video Fault Char Jackson <none@none.invalid> - 2024-07-31 11:18 -0500
    Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-07-31 21:17 +0100
      Re: Strange PC Video Fault Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2024-07-31 21:30 +0100
        Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-01 13:12 +0100
      Re: Strange PC Video Fault VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2024-07-31 16:01 -0500
        Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-01 13:33 +0100
      Re: Strange PC Video Fault Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2024-07-31 22:29 -0400
        Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-01 14:30 +0100
          Re: Strange PC Video Fault Folderol <general@musically.me.uk> - 2024-08-01 14:35 +0100
            Re: Strange PC Video Fault Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2024-08-01 14:33 -0400
              Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-02 00:21 +0100
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault NY <me@privacy.net> - 2024-08-02 15:01 +0100
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-06 23:06 +0100
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2024-08-06 19:05 -0400
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault NY <me@privacy.net> - 2024-08-09 22:40 +0100
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault Java Jive <java@evij.com.invalid> - 2024-08-07 11:21 +0100
                Re: Strange PC Video Fault Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2024-08-07 19:20 -0400

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