Repair order

[bitman]

Hi everyone,

 

I'd like to hear your advice regarding the order I should replace components in a failing laptop.

 

I have this laptop that at some point I believe it got damaged from overheating. Currently it can't handle any medium or heavy workload, let it be playing h.265 videos, or video editing, video games,  number crunching (non GPU dependent), etc. Whenever attempting any of those stuff it just freezes. I know it's not an OS or software thing, because it behaves the same both in linux and in windows. For light stuff like office it works fine.

 

I don't want to ditch it. I want to attempt to repair it. I believe is either the CPU or the motherboard that got damaged and needs to be replaced. I've tracked both items in ebay. I don't mind having to buy and replace both, but if I can save some bucks for replacing the right component the first time, the better.

 

What would you try to replace first? CPU or mobo?

 

[Devin92]

when you say cant handle, what do you mean? does it crash and shut down by it self? Does this behavior suddenly appear or you saw it gradually fading away?

its doubtful they are 'damaged', since if so the pc should not be working at all. take it apart and 1. clean all the dust on the fans, 2. see if you can separate the heat pipe from the CPU, if so, apply new paste. 3. might not be the case, but have you considered HDD failure?

[bitman]

Ok, I should probably mentioned that:

 

1. I already took it apart and clean the dust.

2. Cleaned and applied new thermal paste for both CPU and GPU. I probably applied more paste than I should, but I noticed no changes afterwards.

3. It's not the hard drive. Linux and Windows live in different hard drives, and in both OS it fails the same way.

 

On heavy workloads, it doesn't restart nor shutdowns, it simply freezes... the screen, the input devices, everything. Not blue screen nor kernel panic, just freezes the screen and everything.

 

The failure behavior came gradually. At first it could perform heavy workloads for hours and hours before freezing, then maybe just an hour, then just 20 minutes or so.. and finally it instantly freeze as soon as I fire an heavy application. When on battery it can last a few more minutes without freezing.

 

I believed that maybe some parts of the cpu got broken, like you know those kinds of instructions used in video decoding and for heavy math, I know, it sounds super strange and esoteric. But then I noticed that the video outputs began to fail too. Display port is completely gone, and HDMI sends a flickering image video signal.

 

I don't know what else to do than attempting to change the CPU and/or the mobo.

 

Thanks for your advice