Unfortunately, one of the most common issues found in portable computers is that one day they suddenly just stop working. Sometimes it is a temporary thing, which can be fixed easily. Typically, this problem is directly related to the laptop’s power source, or even to the battery itself. However, this simple step-by-step guide might be of use to you when trying to bring a notebook back to life. To learn just what you should do, check out down below all our tips of what you can try when your laptop won’t turn on!
1. Remove the battery
Before getting desperate because your laptop isn’t turning on, it’s good to know that there’s the possibility that this issue can be fixed with some basic measures. First, you should remove all the power sources of your computer. Remove carefully your battery and place it in a well-ventilated place (outside the sunlight) for a few minutes. Most laptops have removable batteries, but if in your case it isn’t, you can just search online how to take it out.
2. Unplug the cable
After removing the battery, now it is time to remove the charging cable on your laptop. This will obviously ensure that your computer is not receiving any power, something extremely important to make sure that these steps will work properly.
3. Press and hold your Power button
After removing the battery and unplugging the cable from your laptop, now you should check that there’s no power left. To do so, you’ll need to press and hold the power button for at least a minute. Some people recommend that you hold it down for up to three minutes, but just as a precaution. This will guarantee that if there was any juice left on your laptop that won’t turn on gets completely used up.
4. Leave your laptop alone
Now, you should leave your laptop alone for a little while, for at least 20 minutes. This is step is not as necessary as any of the others in this list, but it improves the odds of fixing your computer by a bit.
5. Plug the battery and the cable
After all that, now you should first plug the cable back in the laptop (and on the outlet), and the battery right after. If you prefer, connect only your cable on the laptop, since this might make it more likely to work, in certain cases.
6. Try to turn it back on
Now that you’ve followed all the previous steps, the time of truth has come: try to turn your laptop on. With the cable plugged in, just press the power button, without holding it down. More often than not, it should boot up normally, but you can try to follow these steps a couple more times if it doesn’t work at first.
Check your laptop’s monitor
Sometimes it might seem that your laptop won’t turn on, but in fact it is booting but just not posting (showing anything on the screen). To identify it, you can look for the led lights, the cooling fan noise, and even press the Caps Lock key to see if the indicator let works and the laptop has properly booted. If it does, it can indicate a screen issue, a video driver issue, a problem on the on-board graphics processor (part of the laptop’s CPU), or even on the dedicated GPU. In this case, the first step you should take to diagnose what’s actually happening is to plug your laptop to another screen, which is usually done via an HDMI cable. Plug it on another monitor or even on your TV and try to press the CTRL + P key sequence twice. If nothing happens, try to do it pressing P three times. This command works to duplicate or extend the monitor’s image to the other monitor that’s connected via the cable. If you get an image this way, the most likely case is that your laptop’s screen has gone bad, and so you should take it to a laptop repair store.
Take your laptop to a repair shop
Finally, if you’ve already tried all the above steps more than once and you still haven’t seen any results, what you should do is to take your laptop that won’t turn on to a specialized laptop repair store. Look for a trustworthy service so that the technicians don’t fix what’s not bad and overcharge you. Preferably, you should take it to an authorized shop for your laptop’s brand, to make sure it won’t break the warranty and you’ll get the best possible service. Occasionally, the problem might be related to another part of the laptop’s hardware and not necessarily the battery. In these cases, our tips will definitely not work to help bring it back to life, and you’ll hardly get anything done at home.
Did you manage to fix your laptop that won’t turn on?
Let us know in the comments if we managed to help you out or not, and don’t forget to also check out our guides on what to do if you think Instagram is down and what to do if your iPhone won’t turn on, as well as the best lightweight PC games and the best lightweight Android emulators that will run on any laptop!
