Screen Flickers on Battery Use Only
A customer returned a laptop we had replaced the screen on a while ago and said that after flickering for a while the screen failed. We replaced the screen and found no flickering.
Now a week later apparently the flickering is back. I have only spoken over the phone and it seems that the user would give the screen a helpful whack to try and fix it and I'm pretty sure this is what caused the screen failure.
After a bit more questioning it seems that the flickering only occurs when running on the battery and never when plugged in. This kind of points to something other than the screen
I am wondering if it is just the dimming setting not kicking in properly and causing the apparent flicker, although it could of course be the battery or motherboard.
We changed the screen under warranty but I'm fairly sure this is not related to the screen..
Has anybody else got any experience of this sort of issue?
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L350.
Now a week later apparently the flickering is back. I have only spoken over the phone and it seems that the user would give the screen a helpful whack to try and fix it and I'm pretty sure this is what caused the screen failure.
After a bit more questioning it seems that the flickering only occurs when running on the battery and never when plugged in. This kind of points to something other than the screen
I am wondering if it is just the dimming setting not kicking in properly and causing the apparent flicker, although it could of course be the battery or motherboard.
We changed the screen under warranty but I'm fairly sure this is not related to the screen..
Has anybody else got any experience of this sort of issue?
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L350.
Robert Retzer
do you have another battery you can try? Maybe you can try cleaning the battery contacts on both the laptop and the battery, with isopropyl alcohol and a qtip.
ASKER
I'm not going to get to see it until tomorrow but I'll give it a go.
ASKER
I have just remoted in and changed the power plan from power saver to high performance and stopped the screen from dimming to see if that does any good.
good idea
ASKER
Apparently it didn't make any difference. I will have to go and take a look at it tomorrow.
I was thinking if it really was a bad battery connection, you probably would not have a flickering monitor, but the laptop would probably power off right away, just like hitting the reset but on the old pcs that had both the power and the reset buttons. I am starting to think the problem may be a flakey video card. If this is a HP laptop I know they had problems with some of their high end model laptops that had similar problem, due to a problem of the way the card was soldered to the board. Once the video card was refluxed to the mobo the problems went away. There were lots of online videos showing how to reflux the video card to the board. Anyway one way to see if it is a screen problem again to to try to see if the problem goes away when you connect an external monitor to the laptop. IF the problem still exists then the problem is either the video card or a bad mobo. It is strange it only happens on battery power... that is a mistory.
ASKER
I'll be trying an external monitor tomorrow. It hasn't got the faulty Nvidia graphics chip (and I've seen enough of them...) so I'll see what I can find out tomorrow..
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ASKER
Problem fixed myself. See answer..