BIOS Question

[Bskitter]

Hello Everybody.

A few months ago my friends laptop screen suddenly would not turn on.

He took it to a "Repair" store and they looked at it and said it would cost him roughly 150 US dollars to fix.

He then said he would think about it and took the laptop home with him. He then showed it to me and we looked at the motherboard to see what they worked on/tested.

We saw that the BIOS chip and a lot of flux around it and it was obvious that they removed it.

The repair store somehow put the BIOS chip into a test state and it told the GPU to iterate through RGB colors (To test if the chip and screen were still working).

My question is where there is documentation about laptops and PC's bios programming and different states one could program the chip to work in.

Byron

[Nusa]

I suspect you're much more likely to get useful feedback if you include some important details, like the brand and model of the laptop, and how old it is.

[Lolucoca]

If it's a MacBook, go look at Apple's website for an extended warranty period, their GPUs fail regularly and repair shops usually replace the BIOS chip even though that's not what's wrong with the machine... Early 2008 MacBooks for example. The GPU got too hot and died on a regular basis. I would certainly probe around and see if there are any voltage rails missing or something...

[Rasz]

its most likely dell, booting with D pressed gives you lcd test patterns
probably something old with bad Nvidia G86, and that $150 was for cooki^^^oh im sorry, reflow repair ...