Hi everybody, i'm posting for a friend of mine.
My buddy finally decided to do a full reformat of his 8790. After reformatting, while trying to run the recovery disks/reinstall windows, it kept locking up. He finally took it to Computer Renaissance and, I think, the guy pulled the HDD out of the laptop, hooked it to another computer and did a full HD wipe. The guys at the computer place did the Windows install, without any issues.
Then the problems started up again. Almost every time he had it plugged in A/C, it would freeze/lock up/sputter, however you want to look at it. He also was unable to install SP2, and the comp would lock up and/or give him the blue screen of death - he attributed all of this to some sort of problem with the power at his house, since he said the guy at the computer place had no problem with it, even when it was plugged in.
So he brought the computer to my place today. We plugged it in, it seemed to work, tried to run the SP2 upgrade which caused a crash. At reboot read the Windows recovery stuff and found out it wouldn't work without a BIOS update. Tried to find some info on updating BIOS, but the computer started freezing up AGAIN.
I guess he'd done some research online and heard people say they'd had similar problems due to memory issues. He popped off the back, and took out one of the RAM chips, closed it up, rebooted and all of a sudden the backlight doesn't work. Switched out the memory, tried again, backlight still doesn't work. Put both memory chips back in, still doesn't work.
You can kind of make out what's going on on the screen, but you have to look hard, and it's not lit up at all. I hooked it up to my TV using an s-video out and that works just fine, but even after squinting to reset BIOS to last good configuration (just in case) the screen will still not light up. Tried updating the drivers, tried screen brightness, which is all i could think of.
I opened up the back and looked, but it doesn't look like anything is or could have gotten unhooked during the memory swap.
So the question is:
Is the computer completely gone, or is it salvagable?
I'm pretty sure he's outside of warranty right now, but i'd hate for him to lose the computer all together. We're college kids, and i know he can't really afford another one right now. If anyone has ANY advice at all, please let me know. We'll try just about anything at this point.
If anyone can help us figure out any possible way to fix this, it would be greatly appreciated.
My buddy finally decided to do a full reformat of his 8790. After reformatting, while trying to run the recovery disks/reinstall windows, it kept locking up. He finally took it to Computer Renaissance and, I think, the guy pulled the HDD out of the laptop, hooked it to another computer and did a full HD wipe. The guys at the computer place did the Windows install, without any issues.
Then the problems started up again. Almost every time he had it plugged in A/C, it would freeze/lock up/sputter, however you want to look at it. He also was unable to install SP2, and the comp would lock up and/or give him the blue screen of death - he attributed all of this to some sort of problem with the power at his house, since he said the guy at the computer place had no problem with it, even when it was plugged in.
So he brought the computer to my place today. We plugged it in, it seemed to work, tried to run the SP2 upgrade which caused a crash. At reboot read the Windows recovery stuff and found out it wouldn't work without a BIOS update. Tried to find some info on updating BIOS, but the computer started freezing up AGAIN.
I guess he'd done some research online and heard people say they'd had similar problems due to memory issues. He popped off the back, and took out one of the RAM chips, closed it up, rebooted and all of a sudden the backlight doesn't work. Switched out the memory, tried again, backlight still doesn't work. Put both memory chips back in, still doesn't work.
You can kind of make out what's going on on the screen, but you have to look hard, and it's not lit up at all. I hooked it up to my TV using an s-video out and that works just fine, but even after squinting to reset BIOS to last good configuration (just in case) the screen will still not light up. Tried updating the drivers, tried screen brightness, which is all i could think of.
I opened up the back and looked, but it doesn't look like anything is or could have gotten unhooked during the memory swap.
So the question is:
Is the computer completely gone, or is it salvagable?
I'm pretty sure he's outside of warranty right now, but i'd hate for him to lose the computer all together. We're college kids, and i know he can't really afford another one right now. If anyone has ANY advice at all, please let me know. We'll try just about anything at this point.
If anyone can help us figure out any possible way to fix this, it would be greatly appreciated.
