I have a PCSpecialist Octane III (Clevo P751DM2-G) which is about 18 months old now. Less than a week ago, with no identifiable cause the laptop started requiring several restarts for the screen to turn on (to restart I have to hold the power button to turn it off and then turn it on again). I have narrowed this down to being an issue with the graphics card because it applies to external monitors too and the graphics card fan turns off prompty after the machine boots when the display is having problems, as opposed to when the display does start where the fans remain on constantly. I am also fairly confident it is not a software issue as I can tell from the HDD light that the OS loads in the background even when the display shows nothing. Also when booting into the BIOS the display still does not show anything.
Some further detail about what it does. Generally, once the laptop has started successfully it can be restarted without issue. In fact, last night after having the laptop on for a few hours I was able to turn it back on without issue a couple of minutes later.
My suspicion, based on the research I've done so far is that a capacitor has blown somewhere, most likely on the motherboard? Does this seem like a reasonable diagnostic? If so will it be possible to replace any blown capacitors myself or am I going to be better replacing the board? Finally, am I okay to use the laptop in the meantime?
Returning the laptop for repair is not an option as I have several very important deadlines coming up that I absolutely cannot be without my laptop for.
Answer
The issues developed further to the point of it requiring an hours worth of restarts for the graphics card to boot successfully and even then the graphics card would be unstable and shut down sometimes. Oddly enough though it never failed when running 3D acceleration applications.
Either way, for future reference, the issue was solved by replacing the graphics card.
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