Laptop Troubleshooting and Repair - Toshiba, Dell, HP, ThinkPad, Acer and Sony laptops

The first step in repairing any laptop or notebook is troubleshooting the problem accurately. For example, some people will run out and buy a new battery on the assumption it's failed when the
Problem is a frayed wire or a bad connector on the power cord,

Something that can be fixed with a little solder or electric tape. Likewise, a "dead" LCD screen could be a main board or video adapter failure, a bad inverter or a burnt out back light. When the LCD itself needs replacing, it will probably be due to a physical crack in the glass or blocks of dead pixels. If your CD or DVD drive won't work anymore, make sure you've tried a selection of discs and try a cleaner kit before replacing the drive, and always double-check the connection before discarding the old drive. About the only problems that will identify themselves as imminent failures are increasingly loud hard drives or steadily decreasing battery life over time. The Laptop repair flowcharts is below.

Video Failure 

Assuming that the video processor on the motherboard is working properly and sending the LCDinstructions as to which colors to allow through in which screen points (pixels), the most common failure for laptop displays is a dead or intermittent inverter. When you can only see a very, very faint image of your operating system desktop on the screen, it means that the video system is working, but the LCD isn't getting any back lighting. The usual culprit if you don't have an LED backlight is the inverter, especially if you didn't note any strange tinting to the laptop display in recent operation, but it's not easy for the do-it-yourselves to determine with 100% accuracy whether the failure is theCCFL lamp or the inverter.

Battery Failure

The first step in or charging problems is to check your owner's manual or the manufacturer's website for how to interpret the status LEDs on the laptop or the battery itself. There's a separate flowchart for laptop power supply problems. Some batteries come equipped with built-in LEDs and a button you can press that will roughly display the battery charge by the number of LEDs lit, or show an error state, usually indicating that the battery needs to be replaced. On other models, the LEDs on the laptop will change color or blink when there's a charging problem. In either case the operating manual for the laptop or a search of the manufacturer's web site should tell you exactly what the LEDs are indicating.

Ports and Power Connector

Laptops are sometimes plagued by internal failure of the physical connectors, like the modem or network port seems to be detached within the case, making it tough to get a good connection, or the power connector solder joint to the board breaks. The only way to fix these problems is to open up the body of the laptop, determine exactly what has broken, and do your best to restore it to the original condition, rather than just kludging it. The problem with kludging anything in a notebook is that the tolerances are so tight that your kludge might fail as soon as you snap the case back together. When soldering anything on a laptop board, use a fine tip iron and don't gamble on overheating the board and stripping away circuitry. Use a decent solder sucker to quickly clean up the old solder rather than fooling around with copper wick, and if you get the feeling you're taking to long, just stop and let it all cool down before trying again.