Another work this week: reparing a keyboard of an Asus VivoBook which has some keys not responding. The customer admitted that water has been spilt on it.
Investigation
First things first, I checked whether it was a hardware or software issue, the second being cheaper. Unfortunately, the water must have done some damage. Let’s order a new keyboard. Less than £20 for a new one. This laptop, second hand, is worth more than £150 at the time of this post. Definitely worth changing.
Replacement
To access the keyboard, the laptop needs to be put apart. Once the motherboard is removed, the shell part with the keyboard and touchpad can be accessed.
The keyboard is replaced with a new one then all the laptop is reassembled together. After reassembly, I tested to ensure everything is okay…
Hard drive failure
… and no it’s not okay! The laptop keeps rebooting and falls to the BIOS menu straight away. After contacting the customer I found out that it did happened to her time to time. We agreed to add this on the repairs list.
When checking the BIOS, I noticed that the hard drive isn’t listed. As this is an intermittent issue, at the first following boot to Windows, I run a check disk.
The results show that the hard drive is in good health. This is not the source of our issue.
After checking the manufacturer website, I noticed that the BIOS was a few version behind. Though I doubted it would solve the issue, I decided to flash the new BIOS firmware in case we had a corrupted BIOS (uncommon but possible).
The upgraded went well but the issue remained.
While I was taking the laptop apart to change the keyboard, I noticed that a screw was a bit sticky. This screw was holding the I/O card to the mainboard. Perhaps I should have remembered that detail first. I removed the I/O card and roughly checked any signs of defect. I couldn’t notice anything, just the connector to the motherboard would benefit from a cleaning.
Once done, I connected everything back together and turned on the laptop. Boots to Windows 10! To ensure that the laptop works fine, I repeated a dozen more of reboots then left the laptop turned on overnight.
Next morning, it was a good surprise to see the laptop still on Windows. Previously, it would have rebooted to the BIOS. This laptop required a bit more work than expected but it finally came back to the hands of the customer fully working.
Do you also have a booting issue? Contact me here.
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