Question about my friend's laptop

MagicJie265 · December 28, 2019

Hiii! Hello to any tech gods out there. Firstly, thank you that you used your time to help and see this post. (This laptop is Asus K43S, 1GB vram ver.)

Alright! Recently one of my friend just asked me to repair one of his broken Asus laptop. I asked what happen to the laptop. He said :

Quote

"It was a long 6 years ago, I was playing some games on the laptop. Seemingly fun throughout the process, the laptop suddenly turns off and doesn't turn on afterwards. And we didn't take it to repair until now."

Then, I said to my friend that I'll try my best to cheese the problem out. Having little to small repairing knowledge on computer, I began my investigation on the computer.

Investigation:

Without doing any action to the laptop, I connected the dc power supply and tried to power the laptop up. Then, after powering it. The laptop turns on and off after approx. 5 seconds.

Then I have a hypothesis for this situation.

The ram maybe dead (I changed the ddr3 ram to one of my working one, just in case)
The battery maybe dead
The south bridge maybe dead
The motherboard maybe short-circuited
The mxic bios chip maybe dead
Or .... Long live the cpu

After having my hypothesis up,

I disassembly all the external parts of the laptop, basically leaving motherboard, power supply, a upnp keyboard, and a multimeter at my side.

Then I connected the power supply to the motherboard, and turned on the laptop once again. But this time, I touched the cpu. And unfortunately, the cpu is very hot. Since the laptop can boot up afterwards, which made I guess that ram, bios chip, ec chip, everything else should be okay expect for the cpu king. And even the keyboard was plugged to the motherboard along the process, the keyboard led doesn't light up afterall.

I turned off the motherboard and used a multimeter to test all the integrated circuit, transistors. And.... it seems fine afterall. No burn or explosion spotted. (Hey wait! I'm not an engineer, just a foundation student. Don't bully me please)

Since I don't have a DC Regulator Power Supply to test if it really does have short-circuited problem or not. Then I conclude that laptop is beyond of my ability already.

So.... lastly thank you for reading my long and stupid check-up. However a question still reside me. After all of this, I can safely tell my friend that it's better to let this old laptop rest in peace right? Cheers!

Bitter · December 28, 2019

It's probably not worth repairing and tracking down the problem could be difficult. It may be a broken solder joint somewhere, around 6 years ago I think they were still having issues with ROHS solders and bad solder joints. Maybe reflowing the board and GPU MXM board could fix it but it would probably be a temporary fix. That's a pretty old bit of hardware now, that GT 520M is very very out dated.