Hardware Failure and Missed Blog Post
It was bound to happen eventually. I missed a Words on Wednesday post. What’s worse is that I missed the first post of the year. Not some random Wednesday in the middle of April. I missed the first Wednesday of the first month of the year. Fail.
While I am disappointed that I missed a Wednesday, I do have a good excuse. For one, I was on vacation, without having queued up a post beforehand. Plus, my laptop crapped out while I was out of town (more on that in a moment), so I had no way of writing up a post anyway. I can’t go back and change the fact that I missed a week, but I can at least give you the story of how I broke my laptop (again).
Breaking the Laptop
To get a break from the day to day grind, we decided to rent a cabin up in the Appalachian mountains to bring in the new year. While I was able to take PTO days from my day job, I still have school and side hustle responsibilities that I always seem to be behind on. As such, I decided to bring my laptop with us and catch up on all my other work.
On Monday afternoon, we wanted to watch the NCAA college football bowl games and playoff semifinal games. Since the cabin didn’t have any sports channels, we decided to stream the games from my laptop. What better place to watch the games from, than in the hot tub? I sat my laptop in the rocking chair while we tried to get the kids into the water. Unfortunately, I bumped the chair in the process, and my laptop dumped out onto the deck. The screen went immediately black.
Having just taken my laptop to be repaired back in November, I really didn’t want to have to pay for it to be repaired again just a month and a half later. I brought the laptop inside, and started trying to diagnose the issue. I could remote in from my phone, and everything seemed to still work alright. Even if the screen was fried, I could at least hook it up to a monitor when we got home and use it like a faux desktop. Since I didn’t want to let such a minor nuisance ruin my vacation, I sat the computer aside and went back outside to relax.
That evening, I decided to work on the laptop a little more. I pressed the power button and the HP logo flashed on. Hey, maybe the problem had resolved itself with a restart. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, the screen went black again and stayed off. While the screen still wasn’t working, I at least knew that the display itself wasn’t broken. The HP logo looked fine for the few seconds that it was on screen.
Using remote desktop to access the laptop again, I noticed that it appeared to be the windows default resolution. It was almost as if the screen wasn’t connected to the computer. The screen was clearly getting power somehow, but the video output wasn’t coming across. Maybe the cable had disconnected inside the body of the laptop? Several possibilities crossed my mind, most of them far less severe than what I originally anticipated.
While I would liked to have popped the laptop open then and there, I didn’t have the tools available to disassemble it. Sure, I could’ve bought a screwdriver set from a local store, but working on a hardware issue ruins the point of going on vacation. I wanted to relax, and repairing a laptop is far from relaxation. I decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to worry about. The laptop itself still worked, and I could see about tinkering with the screen when we got home.
Repairing the Laptop, Round 1
Once we got home, we unloaded all of our luggage and I sat down to work on the laptop. Since I’m more comfortable seeing something done before I do it myself, I started looking for disassembly videos. Every video that I found appeared to be for an older model of 15” HP laptop, since they weren’t quite the same build. These all had a bay on the bottom of the laptop that popped off, and the keyboard came off to reveal more internals. My laptop had no bay on the bottom, and the only seam on the top of it went around the outer edge.
I searched for manuals or disassembly instructions. Using both the model number of 15-BS016DX and the product number of 1WP58UA, I looked all over for any shred of information. Everything that I found either described another model, or gave me nothing useful. There were plenty of product pages and reviews, but nothing indicating how I might access the internals.
While I was far from certain in my ability to strip down the laptop, I figured it was worth giving it a shot. Surely, I would know enough not to break anything. Even if I couldn’t manage to fix it myself, I could try to figure out what was going on.
I powered the laptop down, removed the battery, and started taking off all of the screws I could find on the bottom of the body. The only seam appeared to run along the outer edge of the top of the body. Figuring that had to be where it came apart, I ran a card along the seam and felt as connections popped apart. So far, so good.
Getting mostly around the perimeter of the laptop with the card, the top and bottom of the body still felt securely in place. I didn’t want to risk breaking it by pulling it apart when I still needed to take out another screw or something. Since we still had to get dinner and run some errands, I decided to set the laptop aside and come back to it later, hopefully with some sort of documentation available.
Repairing the Laptop, Round 2
After getting back home for the evening, I decided to hook up the laptop to my monitor like I had done the previous time I broke it. Having a stationary but working computer was better than trying to fix it myself and having a severely broken computer. I put the screws back in, replaced the battery, and took it to my computer desk in my bedroom.
I plugged the HDMI cable from the monitor into the laptop, turned on the monitor, and powered on the laptop. Immediately, the monitor displayed some weird, glitchy lines that looked almost like a CRT television turned to a static channel. Well, that was significantly more broken than I hoped or expected it would be. I thought I had just disconnected the display from the body of the laptop. Turns out I made it where the video output won’t even screen mirror across HDMI. With the monitor displaying that jumbled mess, it could be something like the graphics card or motherboard. Those components were far beyond my ability to repair.
At that point, I was just dejected. I knew I would have to pay to have it fixed, probably a lot more than what I had paid to replace the screen. No longer having the mountain view to distract myself from the hardware problem, I just went into the living room. I at least didn’t want to dwell on the fact that I had broken my laptop again, this time even worse than before.
Eventually, I passed by the bedroom door again and looked in to notice that the laptop screen and connected monitor both showed my login screen. Uhhh… what? It was showing some weird glitchy mess just previously. I hadn’t done anything to it since before. How was it suddenly working just fine?
I disconnected the HDMI cable from the laptop, and the display stayed on. I logged in and clicked around for a bit. Everything seemed to be working fine. I closed the screen and opened it back up. Like clockwork, the display blacked out as the lid closed, and came back on when I opened the lid again.
I have no idea what tech wizardry I did, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The laptop continued to work, and still is working some days later. I’ll certainly be more gentle with it now, but I have no idea what was broken before. The problem resolved itself by plugging in a monitor and leaving it alone for a few minutes. If anyone has any theories as to how that fixed it, I’m all ears.
Now that I have a working laptop again, and I’ve missed my first blog post, hopefully I can keep a working laptop and post consistently for a while. If I break the laptop again, I’m giving up on technology and shutting down Words on Wednesday for good. Clearly, I am not capable of taking care of my devices well enough.
While I am disappointed that I missed a Wednesday, I do have a good excuse. For one, I was on vacation, without having queued up a post beforehand. Plus, my laptop crapped out while I was out of town (more on that in a moment), so I had no way of writing up a post anyway. I can’t go back and change the fact that I missed a week, but I can at least give you the story of how I broke my laptop (again).
Breaking the Laptop
To get a break from the day to day grind, we decided to rent a cabin up in the Appalachian mountains to bring in the new year. While I was able to take PTO days from my day job, I still have school and side hustle responsibilities that I always seem to be behind on. As such, I decided to bring my laptop with us and catch up on all my other work.
On Monday afternoon, we wanted to watch the NCAA college football bowl games and playoff semifinal games. Since the cabin didn’t have any sports channels, we decided to stream the games from my laptop. What better place to watch the games from, than in the hot tub? I sat my laptop in the rocking chair while we tried to get the kids into the water. Unfortunately, I bumped the chair in the process, and my laptop dumped out onto the deck. The screen went immediately black.
Having just taken my laptop to be repaired back in November, I really didn’t want to have to pay for it to be repaired again just a month and a half later. I brought the laptop inside, and started trying to diagnose the issue. I could remote in from my phone, and everything seemed to still work alright. Even if the screen was fried, I could at least hook it up to a monitor when we got home and use it like a faux desktop. Since I didn’t want to let such a minor nuisance ruin my vacation, I sat the computer aside and went back outside to relax.
That evening, I decided to work on the laptop a little more. I pressed the power button and the HP logo flashed on. Hey, maybe the problem had resolved itself with a restart. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, the screen went black again and stayed off. While the screen still wasn’t working, I at least knew that the display itself wasn’t broken. The HP logo looked fine for the few seconds that it was on screen.
Using remote desktop to access the laptop again, I noticed that it appeared to be the windows default resolution. It was almost as if the screen wasn’t connected to the computer. The screen was clearly getting power somehow, but the video output wasn’t coming across. Maybe the cable had disconnected inside the body of the laptop? Several possibilities crossed my mind, most of them far less severe than what I originally anticipated.
While I would liked to have popped the laptop open then and there, I didn’t have the tools available to disassemble it. Sure, I could’ve bought a screwdriver set from a local store, but working on a hardware issue ruins the point of going on vacation. I wanted to relax, and repairing a laptop is far from relaxation. I decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to worry about. The laptop itself still worked, and I could see about tinkering with the screen when we got home.
Repairing the Laptop, Round 1
Once we got home, we unloaded all of our luggage and I sat down to work on the laptop. Since I’m more comfortable seeing something done before I do it myself, I started looking for disassembly videos. Every video that I found appeared to be for an older model of 15” HP laptop, since they weren’t quite the same build. These all had a bay on the bottom of the laptop that popped off, and the keyboard came off to reveal more internals. My laptop had no bay on the bottom, and the only seam on the top of it went around the outer edge.
I searched for manuals or disassembly instructions. Using both the model number of 15-BS016DX and the product number of 1WP58UA, I looked all over for any shred of information. Everything that I found either described another model, or gave me nothing useful. There were plenty of product pages and reviews, but nothing indicating how I might access the internals.
While I was far from certain in my ability to strip down the laptop, I figured it was worth giving it a shot. Surely, I would know enough not to break anything. Even if I couldn’t manage to fix it myself, I could try to figure out what was going on.
I powered the laptop down, removed the battery, and started taking off all of the screws I could find on the bottom of the body. The only seam appeared to run along the outer edge of the top of the body. Figuring that had to be where it came apart, I ran a card along the seam and felt as connections popped apart. So far, so good.
Getting mostly around the perimeter of the laptop with the card, the top and bottom of the body still felt securely in place. I didn’t want to risk breaking it by pulling it apart when I still needed to take out another screw or something. Since we still had to get dinner and run some errands, I decided to set the laptop aside and come back to it later, hopefully with some sort of documentation available.
Repairing the Laptop, Round 2
After getting back home for the evening, I decided to hook up the laptop to my monitor like I had done the previous time I broke it. Having a stationary but working computer was better than trying to fix it myself and having a severely broken computer. I put the screws back in, replaced the battery, and took it to my computer desk in my bedroom.
I plugged the HDMI cable from the monitor into the laptop, turned on the monitor, and powered on the laptop. Immediately, the monitor displayed some weird, glitchy lines that looked almost like a CRT television turned to a static channel. Well, that was significantly more broken than I hoped or expected it would be. I thought I had just disconnected the display from the body of the laptop. Turns out I made it where the video output won’t even screen mirror across HDMI. With the monitor displaying that jumbled mess, it could be something like the graphics card or motherboard. Those components were far beyond my ability to repair.
At that point, I was just dejected. I knew I would have to pay to have it fixed, probably a lot more than what I had paid to replace the screen. No longer having the mountain view to distract myself from the hardware problem, I just went into the living room. I at least didn’t want to dwell on the fact that I had broken my laptop again, this time even worse than before.
Eventually, I passed by the bedroom door again and looked in to notice that the laptop screen and connected monitor both showed my login screen. Uhhh… what? It was showing some weird glitchy mess just previously. I hadn’t done anything to it since before. How was it suddenly working just fine?
I disconnected the HDMI cable from the laptop, and the display stayed on. I logged in and clicked around for a bit. Everything seemed to be working fine. I closed the screen and opened it back up. Like clockwork, the display blacked out as the lid closed, and came back on when I opened the lid again.
I have no idea what tech wizardry I did, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The laptop continued to work, and still is working some days later. I’ll certainly be more gentle with it now, but I have no idea what was broken before. The problem resolved itself by plugging in a monitor and leaving it alone for a few minutes. If anyone has any theories as to how that fixed it, I’m all ears.
Now that I have a working laptop again, and I’ve missed my first blog post, hopefully I can keep a working laptop and post consistently for a while. If I break the laptop again, I’m giving up on technology and shutting down Words on Wednesday for good. Clearly, I am not capable of taking care of my devices well enough.
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