Symptoms: flickering screen, might go off completely for a few seconds, or flicker about 5 times a second. Totally unusable. Whether plugged in or not.
Possibly unrelated: doesn’t appear to be charging despite being plugged in.
It’s an Asus, just over 2 years old, was cheap. Always been a bit shit, but it did used to work.
Any ideas what the problem could be? I’m thinking something to do with the internal power supply, which is probably not fixable. I did think loose connection, but it didn’t change if I gently manipulate it…
The connector between the panel and the motherboard might need re-seating, or the lamp is dying. If it’s an LED backlight, they don’t require the high voltage CCFL based ones did, so that rules out a faulty inverter.
It wouldn’t be that difficult to dismantle it and take a look, you just have to go slowly and examine the connections to determine whether the locks need to be lifted/tilted etc to prevent damage.
I had a couple of BenQ monitors which I tossed after a year because the LED arrays would randomly not switch on, meaning the middle or one of the outer edges would be too dim to read. I didn’t bother trying to fix them as they were cheap, I just parted them out to the guys at work who teach electronics.
The battery not charging is likely just a dead battery - not all batteries last as long as they are meant to. The charge circuit could be broken, but meh. If the power supply as a whole was broken I’d expect you’d see far more problems related to performance and reliability (in terms of crashing applications, etc.)
Back up any data which is important before you go inside it with any tools.
I might take it apart, yeah. I keep no data on it, that’s all on a backed up server, so there’s nothing to lose. I’ll have a look later, before the inevitable defenestration and ebay. There are some decent Lenovo machines for £200.
If you’re not worried about it being brand new, look at the Thinkpads which use the 3rd generation Intel core i CPUs. They’re cheap now and are better made than the brand new £200.00 setups. Few years old but as long as you have an SSD in there and 8GB of RAM, you won’t run into many issues in use.*
We have some hp all-in-ones at work - some are Pentium quad cores, the last lot we bought are i5 quad core - not sure which actual SKU the CPUs are but they work well enough. The i5s are overkill, but we specced them purely because one of the IT team in my office wanted an i5 for his desk PC. Obviously, he was told no, etc.
I have an hp elitebook with a 2nd generation i7 in it, big, heavy, survived a few knocks and it’s survived being torn apart a few times to upgrade memory. I can’t fault it really, but I’d prefer a Thinkpad if I were spending my own money.
Given my specific needs - it doesn’t need to move, but I don’t have room for something too big - I started to look for small PCs and separate monitors, thinking I could mount the PC under the table. But for £220, this all in one looks amazing - huge high resolution touch screen, performance is fine (it’s just used for music and a bit of browsing), and I’m looking forward to listening to music with a touch screen within reach for selecting tunes.
I’ll add the Asus to the pile of shitty half working laptops I have