Laptop keeps crashing after an incident

[TechPioneer]

Hi.

I've had my Acer A315-59g for a couple of months now without any problems, but now it keeps driving me up the wall. Just today I dropped the laptop from my lap onto a wet floor, so naturally, I turned it off and inspected it. One or two of the tabs on he plastic cover for the screen was popped out and it was a bit wet, fearing water damage I took the cover and the underside off for further inspection. There is this weird subtle sound coming from the motherboard around the charging port area that sounds like the noise those old PC speakers had. I was unable to fix the noise, so I just put it back together as it was and turned the laptop on. It was working normally, but when I tried to move it, it crashed completely and the screen had some weird artefacts. After some troubleshooting here are my findings:

 

 

 

The noise is coming from the top-right part of the picture.

 

 

This is the whole motherboard.

 

 

 

It randomly decides to crash without me touching it or if I apply just a tiny bit of pressure to the screen to rotate it or to the underside.

The screen gets these artifacts on the top part of the screen just like in the picture or sometimes on the whole screen.

After the laptop crashes, the whole thing is unresponsive, meaning even the keyboard caps-lock light stops responding.

 

Also, here is an audio recording of the noise:

 

I tried disconnecting the speakers, thinking it was an audio problem, but as you would have guessed, it didn't work.

 

 

 

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Any suggestions on possible fixes are welcome.

[OddOod]

45 minutes ago, TechPioneer said:

crashed completely

Bluescreen or straight to off?

If straight to off, try unplugging and replugging the battery. But it's possible you borked that power distro board. Looks like an easy swap if you can get the part. 
If BSOD, check the dmp file with bluescreenview.

 

48 minutes ago, TechPioneer said:

The screen gets these artifacts on the top part of the screen

This is a bigger problem but potentially easier to resolve. Did the artifacting happen before the disassembly? If so, you might have a dying digitizer which usually means a full screen replacement, but it could just be some finger oils or dust so if you have a can of *electrical* contact cleaner, spraying out the screen connector (likely the bottom right 45deg angled port of that full board pic) and ribbon cable with that might solve it. 

Also, if it's pretty recent, you could ask about an RMA, just don't mention the drop
 

[TechPioneer]

12 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Bluescreen or straight to off?
 

Screen just freezes to what it was previously showing, no bluescreen. In the last picture, I was playing a tv show and it got stuck on the girl's face. 

The artifacts are only there when the laptop crashes. Sometimes I get full screen artifacting, sometimes just the top part and sometimes none at all.

 

17 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Did the artifacting happen before the disassembly?

Before the drop, not really. When I dropped it, it was still on, but I was so panicked that I immediately turned it off and didn't really check.

[TechPioneer]

Here is a little update:

I completely disassembled and reassembled the laptop. I turned it on and the screen was blank. I have been suspecting some battery problems, because it dropped from 55% to 23% too quickly while troubleshooting (the battery was disconnected), so as a last resort I plugged the laptop in and it seems to be working fine for a couple of minutes. The trackpad doesn't work, which seems to be weird, but I am too afraid to unplug the laptop to open it back up again lol.

[OddOod]

There is something seriously wrong with it. It's possible that the drop exacerbated an underlying manufacturing issue. Since it's a recent purchase it should still be in warranty. Contact customer service for an RMA

[TechPioneer]

11 minutes ago, OddOod said:

There is something seriously wrong with it. It's possible that the drop exacerbated an underlying manufacturing issue. Since it's a recent purchase it should still be in warranty. Contact customer service for an RMA

I got it from a non-official store, so an RMA might be tricky even though I still should have some warranty left from the store itself. 

About the underlying issue, sometime after I got the laptop, the sound seemed to get stuck for a second once in a while, which I chalked up to some weird os issue. I remember I got bluescreened randomly too.

 

Anyways, it has been playing back a video for about half an hour now, but I will definitely bring it to the shop tomorrow.

Thanks for the advice.