When your laptop stops working, it’s hard to figure out exactly what the problem is. Here are some simple tips to try and resuscitate it. These tips are based on several scenarios. Sometimes you can see something on your screen, sometimes you can hear sounds, sometimes it’s deader than a door-nail. Here we go:

1. Simple fixes. Make sure your battery is charged and/or your power supply is plugged in to a working outlet. Some laptops won’t start until they have a certain amount of charge in the battery. You could try booting the computer without the battery, just in case it is at fault. Resetting the memory chips is another simple solution, one that you can easily do yourself. Find the repair manual for your model online. It will tell you which little door on the back covers the single or double memory chips. Make sure they’re firmly in place.

Make sure that you don’t have anything connected to your laptop that might be preventing it from working. By this we mean things like USB drives, digital cameras, external hard drives, etc.

2. If you can see something on your screen, that means that your laptop is trying to boot up. For different reasons, it doesn’t quite make it. It could ‘hang’, meaning that it gets partway through the boot process and stops, or it doesn’t get past the setup screen, meaning that something is wrong with your operating system.

In these cases, try booting from your optical drive. Put your current operating system CD in the drive and try to boot from it. Your laptop can usually spot a boot CD in the drive and will shoot up a message, something like ‘press any key to boot from CD’. That means  hit any key to instruct the computer to start up using the CD in the drive. If you don’t have an internal optical device (CD/DVD drive), you can use a USB stick.

If you don’t have your original operating system on CD, find your recovery disks. You can use those disks to reset your laptop back to its original condition.

Another path you could take is to use a bootable anti-virus disk/USB stick to bypass your hard drive’s boot system. If a virus is preventing you from starting your computer, a bootable anti-virus disk can help. It will start your laptop and give you the option to scan your hard drive for viruses and/or malware.

 

3. If you can’t see anything on your screen, there are a couple of options for you. Virtually every laptop has a VGA port which will allow you to connect an external monitor to it. This makes it the same as a desktop computer, you’re just bypassing the laptop’s own screen. Some laptops have a keystroke combination which tells it to use the VGA port instead of its own screen. Get out your instruction manual or look for it online and see if you have to press a couple of keys to get it set up.

Many modern computers have HDMI ports. These are a bit like the VGA ports but you use a different cable and connect to an HDTV instead of a computer monitor. You can use the same cable that runs from your BluRay DVD player or your Apple TV, basically anything that is already connected to your HDTV. Once the HDMI connection is made, make sure your HDTV is set to receive a signal from the port that the HDMI cable is feeding. Many HDTVs have multiple HDMI ports. Make sure it’s set to ‘see’ the right one. If you can see your laptop’s output on your TV, that means your laptop’s screen is not working. Time to send it back under warranty or get a new laptop. You could continue using the TV screen, too. It’s up to you.

 

4. If there is a blinking dot or if your laptop tells you that it can’t find a boot device, this usually means that your hard drive needs to be removed and backed up, if that is possible, before you do anything else. If you have important photos and documents on your drive, you must back these up immediately. Don’t keep trying to start your computer, get the drive out and backed up. If you can’t do that yourself, ask a trusted tech friend to do it for you. You can use TestDisk or Recuva to do this. Both are free. Our last post explains how to connect the drive to another computer. 

 

5. Noises. Some noises are good, some are bad. If you have used your laptop for a while, you know what its normal sounds are, all of those buzzing and whirring noises. If you can hear them but you can’t see anything on your screen, things are bad but not a total disaster. You can attach your computer to a monitor and use it that way or you can remove the hard drive in order to back it up. If you’re a bit of a techie yourself, you could try to reset any of the cards that may be attached to the laptop’s motherboard. Normally this isn’t possible but it’s worth a shot.

If your hard drive is making noises, stop what you’re doing and go back to number 4 above. If the problem is in your hard drive, back it up and buy a new one or get one under warranty. The important thing now is to back up  your drive in order to save your photos and documents. Once you get that done, you can get a new drive, install the operating system and software, then start all over again.

There are many different ways that our laptop can let you down but, in general, they are very dependable. We’ve got some laptops that are very old, we’re talking more than ten years, and they still work just the same as they did when they were new. The new laptops are almost as well built as the older ones, some that have SSDs in them are even more dependable. An SSD is a solid state hard drive with no moving parts. No moving parts means that you can’t really damage the hard drive. With the various cloud options that are out there, storing your data on a hard drive is  almost a thing of the past.

Thanks for reading. If you have computer problems, use the comment form below to ask us for help. Better yet, head over to our Facebook page and ask us there. Here is the link:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.