Dell Inspiron 8500 Laptop Autopsy

Note: You can click on these pictures to get a larger version.

This is my ailing Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. It was spitefully built on Dell's web site in 2003 when I was working for Interlinc.net in Branson, Missouri, the crappiest Internet provider ever to burden this world with its tortuous existence. My ex-boss, who was a real con artist, bought this laptop for me back in 2003 as a reward for working two 80-hour weeks to complete a merger with another company.

As a token of his generosity and to thank me for all my hard work, he promised to buy me a new laptop as I was nearing the end of the second 80-hour week. Later, when I asked him to order the laptop, he asked me how I much I wanted to make in payments each month. He wasn't joking either. Of course, since I am so stupid I think the Internet is something you catch fish with, I had totally forgotten about his promise. Actually, I hadn't forgotten, and I was surprised that he was trying to get out of the deal. I reminded him about what he said though, and he magically remembered every detail of the offer!

This is what my laptop normally looks like when it boots up. That beautiful white bar goes across the screen, telling me that everything's going to be OK and all my data is still safe. Then the monstrosity of an operating system I use, Windows XP, slowly thrashes itself into memory.

On June 28, 2006 though, something went very wrong. I should have known it was going to happen because last week I ate Chinese food and my fortune cookie said, "James, your laptop is going to totally crap out on June 28th."

The screen started showing weird boxes and garbage everywhere, and it locked up constantly. I tried to take some pictures of this bizarre phenomenon, but none of them turned out well enough to see the defects.

As I child I enjoyed taking everything apart to see how it worked: radios, my nintendo, televisions, cats, etc. So, I got to work tearing the laptop apart to see if I could fix it. I had taken it apart several times before to replace the keyboard, so it was fairly easy.

The first step in taking apart the laptop is to very gently pry the top panel loose with a screw driver and then rip it off . This reveals the cable underneath for the LCD panel as well as the screws to remove the keyboard.

This is the inside of the laptop after removing the screws to the keyboard and turning it over. At this point all kinds of food fell out from under the keys, and it's a good thing because I was starving.

You can see here the heatstink for the CPU and some kind of copper tube which I think is a flux capacitor. To the right of that is the heatstink and fan for the video card.

This is what the video card looks like after removing the heatstink. Here you can clearly see the flux capacitor as well as the 200-millibyte e-mail cartridge.

I then removed the video card, revealing a hidden chip underneath. I tried tapping on it with a hammer to no avail.

Here you can see on the bottom of the video card that one of the tracers has a defect. It looks like it's burnt or something. I don't know if this is causing the problems.

This is the component the tracer connects to on the top of the video card. I don't know what this has to do with anything, but I wanted to show off my Photoshop skills with the little zoomed circle thingy again.

Since the laptop would not keep running long enough to boot into windows, I decided to try adding more juice. I got an old lamp cord, plugged it into the wall, and placed the bare wires on the other end into the back of the laptop. Wait, that's just something I would like to do. What I really did was hook it up to a CRT and boot it with the LCD disconnected from the video card. Voila!

You can see clearly now some of the garbage that flickers on and off on the screen. Punching the keyboard does not fix the problem but sometimes causes the lines to change colors. If you scream and punch the right places at the right times, you can get some pretty effects.

So, it's definitely the video card and not the LCD display. I booted up the Dell Diagnostics CD to see if I could get any more information.

Running the video memory test gave some ungodly error message, but only when the display was having problems. Since the problems were intermittent, I could run the diagnostic when the display was clear and it would not give me the ungodly error message. I never would have guessed.

Conclusion: It's broken, duh. Probably the video card. Anyway, I don't feel like trying to get a replacement part, and the laptop is almost three years old, so I just ordered a new laptop. Yes, my new laptop is a Dell. I did take a look at some other brands including Lenovo, Toshiba, and Sony, but I wasn't impressed.

Now the monitor on my other computer is starting to flicker. Will I be able to bear two computer tragedies in one week?