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If you've recently acquired a used laptop and you're not tech-savvy, what should be your first step? Most non-techies would inspect the machine's specs and physical condition. However, assessing a computer's specs, especially a laptop, might seem overwhelming, making it difficult to determine its current condition.
In this article, Mytour will guide you on how to check and determine which hardware components of your laptop are malfunctioning. Whether you've been using a laptop for a while or you're considering buying a used one directly from the device itself without being an expert who disassembles each part for inspection. This hardware issue diagnosis method can be applied to both desktop computers and laptops.
How to Check for Laptop Hardware Issues and Identify Malfunctioning Components
The hardware components of a laptop include the screen, the integrated motherboard, hard drive, or RAM, which are the parts you need to check. Other components like USB ports, various ports, or the keyboard can be checked directly through normal usage. Therefore, in this article, we will focus on examining the main components of a laptop: the screen, motherboard, hard drive, and RAM.
Inspecting the Laptop Screen
To diagnose laptop hardware issues and identify malfunctioning components, let's start by inspecting the screen. Typically, the screen is both easy and difficult to assess. It's easy because we can easily spot diagonal or horizontal lines caused by display screen issues, even if it's just one line.
However, if the screen doesn't have streaks, we move on to the second issue that not everyone notices, which is checking for dead pixels on the screen. Dead pixels, are spots of a consistent color, regardless of what color is displayed on the screen. To check for dead pixels, you can use the Dead Pixel Locator software.
For more details, you can check out Mytour's guide on how to test and detect dead pixels on the screen.
Checking the Hard Drive with CrystalDiskInfo
Download CrystalDiskInfo here: Download CrystalDiskInfo.
CrystalDiskInfo is one of the essential software for checking hard drive health, helping you determine the current status of your hard drive. When diagnosing laptop hardware issues and identifying malfunctioning components, there are many parameters to consider. However, with CrystalDiskInfo, you only need to pay attention to the following parameters:
- Health Status: It consists of 3 states: Good, Caution, Bad, with Good indicating the drive is in good condition. Caution warns when some bad errors are occurring on the hard drive, while Bad is the worst state. However, even in the Bad state, CrystalDiskInfo may not fully assess how severe the condition is. You'll need time to test the drive. Nonetheless, if the drive is in this state, you should back up your data and look for a new drive.
- Power On Count: This parameter indicates the number of times the machine has been powered on, helping determine how frequently the laptop has been used. It can also estimate the machine's usage duration if you're considering purchasing a used laptop.
- Power On Hours: If the Power On Count doesn't provide much insight, Power On Hours certainly will. This is the time the laptop has been powered on and used. On average, a laptop is used for about 2500 to 3000 hours per year, and if a laptop has been used for more than 10,000 hours, you should be cautious as your hard drive may fail at any time.
Check RAM with Memtest86+
As you all know, RAM is always the most talked-about component on a computer, whether you know how to diagnose laptop hardware issues or not. Although RAM is one of the least likely components to fail, it doesn't mean it's without issues. To ensure your RAM is working smoothly without any errors, diagnosing if hardware issues like RAM using Memtest86+ is the perfect choice. To perform this laptop hardware issue diagnosis, you need to prepare and follow the guide on checking RAM memory with Memtest86+ that Mytour has experimented with.
Check Integrated Motherboard including Chip, Motherboard, VGA
Mytour wants to dedicate this section and call it Integrated Motherboard because simply on a Laptop Chip and VGA are usually soldered onto the Motherboard, although technicians can open it up and replace it, this capability is quite limited. To check components like the Motherboard, Chip, or VGA, we can divide them as follows.
- With the Chip, we can monitor the temperature to assess the laptop's condition. Typically, a laptop in normal mode reaches 30 to 40 degrees, light tasks may raise it to around 50 and higher when heavy tasks can reach 60 or even 70 degrees. However, for a laptop that hasn't been cleaned for a long time or neglected in terms of maintenance, you might notice even in normal conditions it can reach 60 degrees, feeling very hot to the touch and emitting fan noise. To check the CPU temperature, we use the Speedfan software.
- For the VGA, we can similarly monitor the temperature like the Chip; excessive heat can cause the VGA to throttle, at which point you need to clean the laptop to prolong the lifespan of the devices, avoiding damage due to heat.
- The remaining part is the Mainboard, checking the Mainboard is very difficult to identify. You can only diagnose this laptop hardware issue through usage. The main sign is frequent system freezes, even after reinstalling Windows, difficulty accessing the computer's BIOS or booting from USB, or sometimes causing the screen not to display.
These are the identifying characteristics and advice from our experience in diagnosing laptop hardware issues, determining if laptop hardware is malfunctioning to help you purchase a safer laptop or protect and use your laptop more effectively. If you want a more comprehensive and regular check, the following top hardware diagnostic software will be very suitable for you. Check out Mytour's latest 2017 article on the top hardware diagnostic software for laptops.
