Sony Vaio laptop - no power to screen - possible causes ?, please see add information re events.?

Question

Hi...my pc, a sony vaio laptop four years old,...my "mate" thought he would do me a favour and replace the 512mb with 2 x 512 sodimm memory. During this process, he had to drill the head of a s***w to free up the keyboard (memory is underneath it) and managed to drill into the motherboard !!!.....since then, pc will start, run etc but will NOT power screen or an external monitor.....any ideas or advice gladly welcomed.........and thanks in advance for answers....paul

Answer 1

It's called critical hardware failure.  A hole has been drilled through the mainboard and you're wondering why it won't work properly!?  

You're only hope is to remove the harddisk drive to take it to a PC tech to back up the useful data from it.

I can only imagine what a new Sony laptop mainboard would cost, along with the labor installation fee.  Even if the laptop had a valid warranty attached, it definitely wouldn't apply to your scenario.

If I were you, I'd scavenge any useful hardware from the laptop after removing the hdd and scrap it, while remembering not to let that 'friend' of yours near anything valuable you own again.  

Answer 2

First of all kick your mate in the rear for being such a numpty, did you not think to use some sort of depth guage to stop the drill bit from chewing up the mainboard?

From what you describe it would appear that you may have two options, one is good the other is not so good.

The not so good option is you have severed the BUS from the graphics processor to the monitor. That is to say everything works except the data transfer from the chip that produces the graphic output to the monitor via those nice neat little metal strips in the mainboard. The board is multi layered so what you see on the top and bottom is not always all there is! There is no fix other than a new board. It is the data transfer connection that is broken from the graphics output device and not the power connections.

The second option is much nicer and costs nothing to fix :-) Have you  enabled the second (external) monitor function? When it boots up try pressing the Fn button and one of the F keys on the top, it will have a monitor (or 2) on it, some are F2, F5 or F8 but it varies model to model. Normally 1 press is both internal and external monitor, 2 presses is external only, 3rd will take you back to internal (default) monitor only. If this works then you may be able to reset the BIOS so that it will boot from the external device always.

Answer 3

An external monitor would most likely require it's own power source to run, so check you've connected the necessary display and power cables.

Most laptops have a display adjustment function too. This allows the display to be re-routed to a project for example, and therefore disables the laptops own display. To check if this is the case, consult your laptop manual to find out how to switch display modes, (if it is possible). Most often this will require pressing, and holding, a function (fn) key on the keyboard, and then the corresponding key (often on the numerical side of the keyboard), much in the way you would use the shift key to make a capital letter when typing.

On no account write your laptop off before trying this, as it does seem strange the PC is happy to operate and run despite the fact the motherboard has been drilled through. One would expect a complete failure following something like this.

If however, this doesn't work, then the only conclusion we can draw from this is that the output connector on your laptop has been damaged, or a piece of solder relating to the connector on the motherboard has been damaged also.