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Device shows no sign of powering on.
Laptop batteries are known to degrade over time; after many charge cycles, the battery may not hold a charge very long, or at all. Verify your battery is working by connecting the battery and power supply. After a few minutes, if the battery is good you should see a charging indicator light on the device. If your battery is bad, it will not display a charging indicator and should be replaced. You can follow our battery replacement guide here.
To verify if your power supply is working or broken, safely shut your laptop down (if powered) and remove it’s battery. While the battery is removed, plug the laptop into a power outlet and power it on. If the laptop does not react to being powered on, replace your power supply.
WiFi not displaying
Airplane mode disables Wi-Fi by default. It is very easy to forget it may have been left on. To disable it, left click the airplane icon in the start bar, and tap the larger ‘Airplane’ mode icon that appears. This will disable ‘Airplane’ mode and reenable Wi-Fi.
Click on the Windows start icon, tap the settings icon (a gear icon, directly above the power options icon). When the setting page opens, navigate and click on ‘Network and Internet’. There, you then will see ‘Change Adaptor Options’ which will open a window that will show all your network accessing hardware. Verify there is a device labeled ‘WiFi’ listed; if not, refer to our repair guide here on replacing your WiFi network card.
A blue screen that appears after a system crash. This screen contains a bit of text and a brief description of what caused the problem.
Most blue screen errors that occur are not indicative of larger problems, but just a system crash. Restart the device and see if the problem persists.
You can identify a hard drive related blue screen error by the error it displays. If it displays an error which contains, “NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM”, the hard drive itself has caused the error. This blue screen error indicates your hard drive is failing. You can follow our repair guide here to swap out your hard drive.
In most other cases, a blue screen error occurs because of a failed or failing random access memory (RAM) stick. These errors are identified by their stop/error codes which display a hexadecimal value such as “0xC000021A”. After restarting, if this problem persists, consider replacing your RAM by following our guide here.
If replacing the Hard Drive and System Memory do not solve your Blue Screen errors, your motherboard may be failing. To replace your motherboard, follow our guide here.
Laptop is extremely warm to touch and may even shut down as a result.
In most cases, a warm laptop is the result of a blocked cooling vent. Many people are simply unaware that the cooling vents take in air from the bottom of the laptop. By placing a laptop on a level surface, this may eliminate your overheating problem.
The next most common problem is a clogged cooling fan. Laptop cooling fans can become clogged with dust by normal use, and even quicker in dusty environments. Remove the back cover of the laptop and you will see a fan. To clean the fan, use a can of compressed air and blow dust in fan outwards from the laptop. Once the fan is clean, you may replace the cover and continue with normal use.
If the previous two steps didn’t solve your overheating problems, your laptop’s Cooling Fan may be broken. You can follow our repair guide here to replace this fan.
No sound coming from the speakers.
Verify the device is not muted by checking the speaker icon on the start bar. If muted, the device will show a speaker with a white X in front of it.
The lack of audio may be caused by the program you’re using. Use a different program that is known to output audio to test your speakers. If using another program produces sound, you have identified your speakers is still working.
The bottom cover has openings for the speakers as well as the fan, this means the speakers could have dust or debris in the speaker itself. Remove the rear cover and remove any debris in the speakers.
If you did all the previous steps and you still have no audio, you may need to replace the speakers. You can follow our repair guide for the speakers here.