Asus x54h Laptop booting issue- black screen, no BIOS.

[DakotaSamuel]

I have a friends Asus x54h laptop that is not booting, and it is droving me crazy.

What is happening:
When the power button is pressed the fan turns on and some indicator lights turn on including the hard drive indicator light. Then the disc drive makes a noise and the hard drive indicator light turns off. Here is a picture of the indicator lights:

Nothing ever shows up on the screen.
Sometimes after running 1-5 minutes the laptop will just completely turn off.

What I have tried:
-Booting with just the power cord connected.

-Booting with just the battery connected.

-Taking out the battery and unplugging the power cord and holding the power button for 40 seconds, then plug in and try to boot again.

-Attaching a screen and pushing the keyboard buttons to add an additional screen. Nothing showed up on it.

-Taking it's hard drive and putting it in a good laptop. It booted into Windows and ran without issues.

-Replacing the current stick of ram with a new one from crucial.com. This laptop only has one RAM slot and I don't have any compatible RAM so I had to just buy one. I put it in, and nothing happened differently. Also, if I remove the RAM completely nothing happens differently. This made me think that there might be an issue with the RAM slot. I looked at it, and there seems to be something a little weird about one of the connectors. Here is a picture:

I am not sure, but I thought that this might be causing the RAM to not be detected. I used a voltmeter to test between the trace of the RAM and where that connection goes into the motherboard, and it seems to be good (not certain though).

-Took apart the laptop and removed the CMOS battery overnight. When I put it back together and pressed the power button nothing happened. I tried a few more times and then it started to do what it usually does but then it powered off after a few seconds. I tried again and it returned to normal doing what it usually did. Fan turns on and indicator lights turn on, disk drive runs for few seconds, hard drive light turns off, and screen remains black.


So, now I am almost completely out of ideas. The only thought I have is maybe trying to reflow the GPU. What are your thoughts? Do you think that might be the issue or is it the memory slot, or something else? I really want to get this working since my friend doesn't have the cash to buy a new laptop.

Thanks!

 

[GokAy]

The 3rd fin on the right side of RAM slot looks like broken. Is it the case?

 

[DakotaSamuel]

Yes. Would that cause issues? On the RAM there are connections on both the top and the bottom. Will a connection to either side work or are both sides a different unique connection? On the slot, the top fin is still good.

 

[DakotaSamuel]

So, I did this:

And somehow it worked! But then I noticed that the screen had a weird pattern of white blotches. I did some googling and found that this could be caused by liquid getting behind the screen. I took apart the screen and found that the previous owner had spilled some type of brown liquid into it (when I previously took apart the laptop I had noticed some of it on the motherboard and keyboard as well). I got the screen all cleaned up and put back together. There were a few little smudges left, but they are barely noticeable.

But this laptop still refuses to be fixed. Now it is shutting off randomly. It will be running fine, and then suddenly it will just completely turn off. Sometimes it makes it completely through booting into windows before it shuts down, but usually it just makes it past bios. I have tried with just the battery and just the power cable and either way makes no difference. I am thinking that this means that the laptop is overheating. Since the fan is constantly spinning and there isn't much dust in it or the heatsink I thought that maybe replacing the thermal paste on the cpu and gpu would help. Gonna try it tonight. Any other suggestions?

 

[DakotaSamuel]

After a bit more research I found that the maximum tempurature of the pentium b950 processor which this laptop has is 85 degrees Celsius. I was able to run realtemp on it, and it only gets to 60-65 degrees before it shuts down. I was also able to test the power from the ac power cord. It is supposed to put out 19 volts, and when I tested it, it was steadily at 19.1 volts. I am trying to find if there is some type of auto shutoff feature that would make the laptop turn off if tempurature is too high, or the battery gets too low. I thought I could find a setting like that in BIOS, but I can't seem to find it. The BIOS is really wierd on this laptop. The only settings I can find are settings that control which OS to boot into, which is completely worthless to me since windows 7 is the only one on it.

This is getting frustrating...

Edit: finally found the normal BIOS settings. I was sure I had already tried presseing F2... No settings about automatic shutoff though.