GT735 appears dead

Hi.

Recently, a colleague of mine had purchased GT735 from ebay. Nice machine, excellent graphics.

However, he had issues. With stock drivers, he kept having reboots after enabling Turbo mode and playing with it for 5-10 minutes. He had updated the drivers then and reboots disappeared.

But, yesterday, when he had to go, he didn't shut down laptop, only sent it to sleep mode and put it in the bag. On arrival, he couldn't get his laptop out of sleep mode and had to shut it down manually, holding the power button. Then, Vista offered him to boot in Safe mode, however, it didn't load as well.

Now, machine is in unusable state, pressing a power button turns on the indicators, but it wouldn't boot. It merely lights up the LEDs and does nothing.

What might have happened to it? Can we fix this?

Thanks.

 

Update:

Unfortunately, he already got rid of the box, in which GT735 arrived, and said it means no warranty for him. Surely, he was desperate to do something and opened laptop itself. There, we located CMOS battery and disconnected it for about 5 minutes. Connected it back, closed the cover and tried to power it on again. Still, only LEDs are alive.

 

Try taking out the battery, plugging the notebook in the wall and putting it on

 

As you describe the problem, unfortunately I have to say that your friend might fried his video card. After you've already opened it, you can try to boot it without memory and video card. I don't know how is this with laptops (my experience is with desktop computers), but it should beep, or may be flash some diodes, indicating that it needs memory, video card. Watch for such simptones and deskribe it here. If it's not me, somebody else shall help.

 

Did that, doesn't help.

Laptops do beep to (experience of another colleague of mine, who fried internal GPU in Fujitsu), and they should do it the same way desktops do. However, this machine is silent.

We are suspecting CPU fail. Or, there may be problems with AC, as AC adapter connector is having quite a loose in its jack in the laptop. As for GPU, we aren't really sure about unseating it, a lot of screws and protections there... We did reseat the memory though.

 

You've updated video drivers right? That's why I sugested that it might be the video card, because maybe the new drivers have higher point of safe temperature that turns the video off (I'm not sure of this). I don't think it might be the CPU, becaus the Turion ZM-82 (I suppose you have this model) has max operating temperature of 100C. Also I know that AMD CPUs are tested to operate, before they come on the market, up to 120C. This temperature is much higher than the operating temperature of the HD3850, wich is 95C. Also the video card is the one that heats much more than the CPU. So I don't know do you have somebody with compatible laptop that you can ask to take his CPU (again I don't think that is due to it) and video card to try possible reasons. If don't I don't think that you can do much more... exept to bring it to repair servese, and as I know they will take your skin off.

 

Yes, we updated them... Why would GPU or CPU get to high temperature, it was in sleep mode right before failing?

We are not really into further tampering with laptop internals. He's sending his machine to repair service. Not sure what would they ask for repairs, machines like GT735 are rare in our country.

Thanks for the feedback.