R61 - "bad" NVS 140M, freezes on any motion

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slname
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Location: Zagreb, Croatia

R61 - "bad" NVS 140M, freezes on any motion

#1 Post by slname » Sat Jan 08, 2011 6:30 pm

Here's the story:

I have a 3 year old R61 with an NVS 140M card. A couple of months ago the graphics card died on me (it's a known hardware malfunction) and the repair shop said, as I expected, that the whole motherboard needed to be changed, which turned out to be way too expensive to do. The symptoms were rather simple - the "on" LED would turn on and that was it - no CPU fan spin, no beeps, no nothing.

Fast forward to about a month ago and I found out that people successfully used heatguns to "reflow" the motherboard. I had no heatgun and continued to search for a possible method of fixing the graphics card. I found that people also had success when they tried baking their motherboard. Yes, baking. I had nothing to lose, so I disassembled the whole thing, and baked my MBO at about 200 degrees Celsius, for 15ish minutes. I reassembled the laptop and voila, the [censored] thing actually worked.

But of course, it didn't *really* work. It turned out that I either needed to apply some preasure on the keyboard where the graphics chip is located, or I needed to switch it on in very peculiar positions - ie put it so that it's lying on the LCD back with the keyboard hanging in the air etc. At first I thought it was due to the HDD and the motion sensor, but it's nothing to do with it (at least I think it's not, the HDD turned out to be perfectly healthy, plus the screen should turn on even if there's no HDD in the machine).

So what happens now is that the screen doesn't even turn on (I press the power button, the power LED turns on, nothing happens at all and then the power LED turns off) or, if I apply pressure on the graphics chip or put the laptop in an awkward position, if it actually turns on (HDD led is on, display turns on etc), even the slightest motion can turn freeze the system. And it's the weirdest thing, if that happens, the display doesn't turn off, but the HDD lamp goes off and the screen freezes - I can type or click whatever I want, but there's no reaction, the screen is completely frozen and there's no way to recover other than forcefully turning the laptop off and trying to boot again.

Now all this seems to be related to GPU, but some of the symptoms point to weird HDD behavior. Does anyone have any idea about what's going on? Is there a way to turn the HDD motion sensor off in BIOS?

Thanks in advance.

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