Laptop problem

[monkey44]

Consider me somewhat compter-stupid -- I use them but can't fix much

Have no idea what happened here. Shut off my laptop last night, this morning when I fired it up, the screen is completely black. Couple days ago, a small black "dot" (sort of a spot, about half inch around), appeared in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and when I ran my finger over it, the dot was very hot to the touch. Dot stayed there for a couple days. Screen was the same last night ... then today, I turned it on and screen will not light up. Any thoughts??

Coincidentally, ran a virus scan yesterday, and found nothing. Completely clean ...

Hooked up external montitor. Launched Windows XP ... computer screen lit up and Windows began loading, Windows Icons appears in center of screen, blinks and flashes like normal. Little green ribbon scrolls like normal ... Suddenly, screen went blank ... note at bottom says "no signal" ... tried three times, same result.

Put monitor back on desktop CPU ... works correctly. Hope this is not a huge ouch -- need data more than I care about the laptop -- have some data in transit to storage that has not been backed-up yet. Please tell me data is retrievable -- I have original XP disk, but don't want to reconfigure unless I'm sure I won't lose data ...

 

[kitkat22]

The data is retrievable. It sounds like a video problem. How old is the laptop? is there a warranty? I would send it in if there was. You can pull out the hard drive and attach to a desktop via a special adapter for small hard drives. Set the drive as slave or cable select depending on what your destop hard drive is set as. (usually Cable Select) The adapter only costs about $15 depending on where you go to get it. Hope this helps.

 

[monkey44]

The computer is a only a couple years old, but out of warrantee ... my biggest concern is to get out the data, and I'm not a computer person ... but can sure take it to someone that is and have it done... As always, we hope for an easy answer, but don't often get one. I just bought a HD back-up so should not lose anything from here on ... but have been a little lazy in CD back-ups -- won't happen again.

 

[tweekah]

When you are booting with the external monitor, hit FN + F8 (normally on most laptops) after the windows loading screen.

 

[alzan]

You could also get an external drive enclosure for the laptop drive, then plug the external drive to your desktop PC via USB; drive enclosures for 2.5" drives run anywhere from 9.99 to over 40.00 on Newegg. Once you get your data, you could buy a second notebook drive for the external enclosure, presto, you've got a backup drive.

alzan