0954
The Dell laptop has been having a problem when it gets moved… which is definitely an issue for a laptop.
It will randomly BSOD and restart when moved; but is stable when, well, stable. It seems to be a flexing issue.
Looking online, the only problem I found which comes close is someone saying the battery has bulged on some of this model and cracked the motherboard, which sounds plausible.
Time to open it up.
Battery looks fine and there's no obvious damage, although a teeny crack on the motherboard would be impossible to spot.
There IS an issue though: the m.2 SSD has a bolt holding it down, but the screw head wasn't actually over the m.2 board, meaning the board was floating. Seems to me that this would certainly cause an issue when the laptop is moved. I reïnstalled the boot with a washer under the head to hold the board down properly.
…but then:
Trying to boot the laptop gave me some blinking LED error code to do with memory. I tried reseating the RAM: same; tried it in the other RAM slot: slightly different error code.
I'd reseated the RAM when poking around inside initially and wondered if I'd static-killed it…
Spent some time trying to find the anti-static wrist strap which I know I have somewhere.
With that on and connected to an earth pin, I tried the RAM in the new Trigkey mini PC (only other machine that takes DDR4) and it worked fine, which was a relief, but meant something was wrong with the laptop.
It had been giving me a low battery warning, so I tried unplugging the battery and booting from mains power: worked fine. Phew!
Battery seems to be charging ok.
Waited while it did some Windows updating, then tried picked it up by all the corners and flexing it a bit: the kinda stuff that would make it BSOD before…
Seems ok! Hopefully the problem was just a loose hard drive.
It still gets really hot and the fan blows like jet a engine, but I'll live with that! ...even if it means I can't ever actually use it on my lap unless I want to melt my shorts onto my legs.
