Spent 4 hours chasing a phantom short in a laptop that was just a bad BIOS setting

Had a customer bring in a gaming laptop that wouldn't turn on at all, no lights, nothing. I spent the first hour checking the usual suspects, the power jack and the main board fuses, all good. Then I pulled the whole thing apart, checked every rail for a short to ground with my multimeter, and found nothing obvious. I was about to order a new board when I decided, as a last ditch effort, to pull the CMOS battery and let it sit for 10 minutes. Plugged it back in and it booted right up. Turns out the BIOS had somehow corrupted itself into a state that looked like a dead short to the power circuit. Has anyone else run into a 'dead' device that was just stuck in a weird firmware state? What's your go-to reset trick before you start ordering parts?

2 comments

2 Comments

jakeb2510d ago

Honestly that sounds more like a weird glitch than a real short. Tbh I've seen a few laptops act totally dead from a bad BIOS, but calling it a short seems like a stretch. Usually a hard reset fixes it without all the board testing.

markhall11d ago

Had a TV do the same thing last week. A full power cycle by unplugging it for a minute fixed what looked like a dead main board.