Laptop Fried!

[ThePhleo | 2,185]

Well it happened, my laptop fried somehow.

I noticed that for the past few weeks it’s been getting extremely slow, and network connectivity would drop out once in a while, not to mention I would get an occasional blue screen once a week for the past month!

The shitty thing is I haven’t done my weekly backup yet, so if the SSD failed as well then I lost a weeks worth of data, which includes  a couple dozen box, manual, cartridge and board scans....oh well, I doubt the drive fried but I’m prepared to accept it if it did.

This laptop was my daily driver and I think it’s finally time to upgrade to a PC again.

The most annoying thing is I was planning on upgrading around Spring next year! Darn it

[Brickman | 3,994]

Sounds like it might be time you also looked into getting a NAS considering how much critical data you have. 

The NAS will allow you to setup a RAID configuration to protect against data loss if a hard drive fails.

You will also be able to setup nightly cloud backups or backups to external hard drives (remember to disconnect them as a security measure). So there is no need to remember to do a backup.

If you have the money you could also put in business grade NAS hard drives just for a little bit more reliability over consumer grade. 

I think if you are willing to pay for NWC pictures you should definitely get the right IT equipment to protect the data.

Let me know if you have any questions.
 

[ThePhleo | 2,185]

After hours of work I managed to get it to boot...but man at what cost. i no longer trust this thing so I’ll be backing up all data in it manually.

Looking now, there’s nothing “important” in here but I’m glad I managed to get it this far  

 

 

Edit: So I got the thing working 100% perfectly again, put it all back together and I’m going to assume the flaw was either the trackpad, dust, or wiring.

Somehow it’s working faster than before, and all I did was remove the trackpad....Why?

Either way, I’m gonna push this thing as far as I can, and operate solely on a SECONDARY external hard drive I have laying around (meaning not my backup drive)

I *really* want to push this laptop until the next generation of AMD processors come out.

...

Anyone have any ideas why a trackpad would cause issues like this?

Edited September 26, 2020 by ThePhleo

[drxandy | 3,235]

Static? Uhh maybe something loose that you tightened the connection in disassembling and reassembling? Dust? All I can think of is a bad connection that was making the thing work harder.

[Tanooki | 4,936]

10 hours ago, ThePhleo said:

Edit: So I got the thing working 100% perfectly again, put it all back together and I’m going to assume the flaw was either the trackpad, dust, or wiring.

Somehow it’s working faster than before, and all I did was remove the trackpad....Why?

Either way, I’m gonna push this thing as far as I can, and operate solely on a SECONDARY external hard drive I have laying around (meaning not my backup drive)

I *really* want to push this laptop until the next generation of AMD processors come out.

...

Anyone have any ideas why a trackpad would cause issues like this?

Umm tell me more, I'm partly in a similar boat, about the AMD stuff vs intel for 2021.  I'm coming up on 6 years with my laptop.  NP8278 / Model number: P170SM-A is what I have.  I went mid-tier with the CPU being an i7-4710 (2.5 to 3ghz), Nvidia 980 8GB video, 16GB RAM, that aside from the 1TG SSD is irrelevant.  This year I've been off and on slowly having problems too where the keyboard was not responding on certain spaces having to pound on it with my finger to pick up, or it would repeat letters, just weird catches with it.  I tried to clean it, blow it out from the top side, nothing worked.  Ultimately I had to remove the entire plate and keyboard, shook it out, cleaned everything including its ribbon pins and ports on the board and it has been friendly for the last couple of months.  Was freaking me out as getting a replacement outside of China now is impossible and well virus...  A few years back I had touchpad issues too where it was ok but the bio scanner would foul up and that came down to drivers deciding to fail on their own.

I know its time could be up in a month or another 3 years, so I've put a fund to the side.  My guess is probably as good as yours on the touchpad.  Have you done as I did with the keyboard with a good solid rub down cleaning on on the pins and ports using 91% alcohol?  It could just be dust, age, oils, whatever got into it, after all lots of finger contact.

I did go through HDD scares too up until nearly 3 years ago now.  Lame warranty kept me constrained, but some design defect in the build put me with an HDD that would commit suicide about once every 12 months +/- 1-2 months.  I went through the original and 2 more on warranty as I had no choice.  Once it decided to kill itself a 3rd time, off warranty, I got a 1TB SSD and it has been happy ever since (keyboard aside.)  So I get the fear of implosion, I lost a LOT Of game save data on some GoG titles and at the time they didn't have Galaxy+cloud.

Edited September 27, 2020 by Tanooki