How To Troubleshoot a Laptop

Troubleshooting the physical problems in your Laptop follows a series of actions that includes the physical look for your laptop parts, diagnosing and reaching the right cause of the problem and troubleshooting it.  You need to find our that whether the problem is with your laptop’s hard disk, power, BIOS settings, video adapter, physical memory or with the battery.  Turn on your laptop and if it does turn on by using the battery then insert the power cable in the power outlet in the wall.

Power and Battery Problems

To troubleshoot the power related problems with your laptop you need to do the following.

• Check to see if your power cable is properly inserted in the AC adapter and in the laptop.
• Insert the power plug into the power outlet on the wall.
• If your laptop’s power is on by inserting the plug into the power outlet then the problem might be with your AC adapter or battery.
• Check the status of the battery if it is being charged or not.  You can check the status by double clicking the charging symbol at the right bottom side of the laptop’s desktop.
• If you do not see any battery charging activity then the one and only solution is to replace the battery with a new one.
• Sometimes there is a problem with the AC adapter and it does not provide the power to the laptop. After verifying the problem with the AC adapter, you can also replace it.

Video Failure
                       
The first thing to check to troubleshoot the video related problems in a laptop is to check the power status. After turning on your laptop if you do not hear the voice of the inner FAN then the display problems are might not be related to the VGA.  The problem is most likely to be related to the power and motherboard. 

Additionally, if your laptop doesn’t show any display then the problem might be with the RAM, video card, processor and the power cables.  You need to check these components one by one and find the problem.  Replacing the faulty component with the new one would fix the problem.

Hard Disk Failure

Laptop’s hard drive has the high failure rate the computer’s hard drive because of the high bounce rate and frequent movements.  Your laptop’s hard disk problems can be occurred due to the following reasons.

• Mechanical Failure.  If your hard disk is physically damaged then you need to replace it with a new one.
• Virus attack.  Install and scan your computer with an up-to-dated antivirus program.
• Bad sectors.  Logical bad sectors can be removed by formatting the hard disk and re-installing the operating system.
• Power failure.  Use UPS with your laptop it will prevent your hard disk failures from the electricity jerks and power failure.

General Troubleshooting Tips

• Make sure that your laptop has the updated version of the BIOS
• Install up-to-date antivirus, anti spyware programs to deal with the viruses and spyware.
• Install and configure a strong firewall program to block the intruders, unauthorized access and hackers’ attacks.
• Regularly update your laptop’s operating system with the latest services packs, security patches and hot fixes.
• Install a hardware/software monitoring program to check the health status of your laptop’s hardware.
• Make sure that your laptop’s battery is properly charging and discharging.
• Do not using any testing equipments with your laptop if you don’t know how to use it.