Laptop Woes

I just got hold of a laptop (Packard Bell EasyNote F5 series) and am having some problems with it.

Main issue is that the screen will just go black for seemingly no reason at all and randomly.  Sometimes it comes back if I put the lid down for a few seconds and then open it again but more often than not I need to shutdown and restart.

The comp is a Celeron 2700 with 192Mb of RAM but has no battery.  Does anyone know what might be the problem?


tl;dr: laptop monitor keeps switching off, halp plox!!

Old Laptop screens do that, just don't touch it. My old Pentium MMX 233mhz does that, too, except it's white.

I don't think that is it, I have picked up the laptop moved the screen back and forth and that's fine but it will turn off as I am typing of something.

Laptop whoas

There might be something wrong with the wiring... take it to someone who will look at it for free (some places will only charge for fixing, not for diagnosing)

>>4
I loled

Dying backlight or backlight inverter is usually the biggest suspect in these situations.

>>1
I am going to stop trolling for a few minutes. This only happens like once a week so listen up

You can really have some good times with your computer. You seriously should learn to fix it yourself. Nobody cares about how it runs but you. If you take it to some jackhole and tell him to fix it, it's not going to get done right. Even if you have a father/brother/boyfriend/whatever that you LIVE with who is a Lunix tard and fixes computers for a living, he can't fix it like you can. Even if you're mediocre at best dealing with hardware. Only you use it enough to make a true diagnosis of your computer's health.

Start troubleshooting. Rule everything you can out, then make an educated guess about the source. You know where all the components came from (or have at least a good guess). You know that hard disk failure is probably not the culprit because it's new. Did you install Windows from scratch on it, or did you use some utility to move it from your old disk (like MaxBlast/dd/etc.)? Can you consistantly get your disk to register in the BIOS? Can you make it consistantly fail? If either is true, you found the cause. Try replacing the IDE cable. If that fixes it, you found the cause. Try removing one stick of RAM and see if the problem happens still. If so, take it out and try the other. If still, try one stick in the other DDR channel or another slot. If that still doesn't fix it, you ruled out a RAM error too. Remove all PCI cards but the graphics. Remove all other disk drives. If this doesn't fix it, you've ruled out the possibility of a power drought (not enough power from the power supply causes brownouts that show this kind of behaviour).

Try anything else reasonable you can think of. If all else fails, you have a bad IDE channel on the motherboard. In that case, you need a new motherboard.