[Rustington] Asus laptop power problems

[JACK COGMAN]

Paul and others,

I am pleased to report that our ASUS laptop is now working again. What I am not so pleased to report is that I have no idea of what the caused the problem or how it was corrected. I was about to plug in an external monitor, as suggested by Paul, but thought I would have yet another try at starting, when - lo and behold - the linux start-up window appeared. I had done nothing special to it, other than leave it alone for 24 hours.

One possible explanation is that a spurious charge had built up. When I did a google search for this problem (and found incidently that it is quite common), one of the proposed solutions was to remove the battery and hold the power button down for 15 secs. This apparently is to discharge any spurious charges. 
Does anyone have any better ideas?

Jack


________________________________
 From: Paul Willis <phwillis at gmail.com>
To: JACK COGMAN <jack.cogman at btinternet.com> 
Sent: Friday, 7 December 2012, 11:58
Subject: Re: [Rustington] Asus laptop power problems
 
Sympathy Jack

I have a similar beast dismantled in front of me! Have you tried
plugging in a monitor? If this works (boot up with monitor plugged in
& may need after boot Fn + screen key {F4?} to enable, and maybe turn
up the brightness). If you can get external picture then you have a
problem with either your screen or its inverter or maybe the
cable/connectors between. If the inverter has gone (powers the
backlight) you should see a very faint image on the screen. Last
inverter I bought was about £2.50 posted from China. Screens very
variable! The one I need is about £230 at headline google ad price,
£139 Amazon,£98 ebay refurbished, $80 from US, have seen it for £30-40
+delivery  on google 2nd page probably refurbished but with warranty.
Unfortunately out of stock nearly everywhere ... I am about to give
the owner a ring!

If the external monitor doesn't work you may have melted your GPU and
could be looking at a new mainboard and/or possibly processor -
probably not worth it. You description suggests the battery & power is
good. After boot if you type Ctrl+Alt+F1 that should open a terminal
on most linuxes. If you then type in your name & password correctly
you can imagine a prompt! Then type:   sudo shutdown -h now [&
enter/return] followed by entering your password again, the system
should shut down. This will tell you the rest of the system is OK and
give you a sense of pride that you don't need a screen :) Perhaps you
know a blind person that would like it!

On 6 December 2012 18:52, JACK COGMAN <jack.cogman at btinternet.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> We have an Asus slim-line laptop which until recently has been running well
> with Ubuntu 12.04. Now I cannot even power it on.
> If I switch the power on key, an led embedded in the key illuminates,
> indicating that there is power, but then nothing happens. I can switch it
> off by holding the power key down for 10 secs., but that is all I can get it
> to do. The frustrating thing is that a few days ago while it was charging, I
> was able to successfully switch it on.
>
> When a similar problem occurred at one of our meetings, it was corrected by
> re-seating the batteries. However, this is not possible with the Asus
> laptop, as it appears to be a sealed unit, so you cannot access the
> batteries.
>
> Any ideas what the problem may be?
>
>
> Jack
>
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