Hello!
This laptop has had a rough time by it's owner (my cousin
), I was told that it was spilled with coke several times, but how it continued to work is a mystery. Last year I was told that the laptop turned off under load and I confirmed the same thing. I had stuff to do and I left it in a corner. Months later I tried turning it on, but nothing was powering on. I took out my multi meter and I found out that the dedicated Nvidia GPU has a short to ground by putting positive multi meter probe on the GPU power coils and negative probe on the ground screw. I removed the GPU power coils, idea being that I read online it's possible to convert these laptops to only use Intel iGPU. Once I removed the coils and powered the laptop on, there was still nothing. I thought hmm, maybe I need to reprogram the BIOS. I found a similar Asus model being X555LAB, which I believe has iGPU only. I remember I took this BIOS dump from someone, who posted this dump here in these forums. I flashed that BIOS using my CH341A programmer, of course taking a dump of the original one, and once I soldered the chip back on, the laptop turned on by my surprise. Even a reboot was fine. Then I realized I needed to copy over serial number, ethernet card MAC address, windows product key. And from there everything went from working to this day I am now, where the laptop doesn't show nothing on the screen. Basically what I did I took that BIOS image, I tried to understand how to transfer the MAC address and windows product key from the dumped BIOS into the new one, but without success. I made some mistakes by booting up the laptop with some solder bridges I didn't notice. I desoldered the BIOS chip a lot of times and reprogrammed it. Then I noticed that the laptop had developed a problem, where I turned it on, it took either a long time for the BIOS screen to appear or when it did appear, the whole UI was sluggish slow. Plus when I rebooted the laptop, nothing showed up on the screen, only the backlight turned on. I also noticed that there was no boot options available, my ventoy usb didn't show up and the HDD didn't show up. These were the last signs of life I still remember the laptop had. I was thinking maybe I had killed the BIOS chip, so I ordered 5 chips from aliexpress and I put the laptop to rest. Two days ago those chips came and I took out the laptop and turned it on. Now I had nothing on the screen and laptop took a good minute to even start the fan. I thought that's strange, so I programmed a new BIOS chip, same model number as the original did, and I soldered it on. Still nothing showed up on the screen. Basically something went horribly wrong, but it's possible that maybe this problem started because of me not knowing before that the ME code needs to be cleaned, as I did flash a different model BIOS. I don't know, maybe the PCH or the EC died or there is something I missed.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it should help understand what component failed or I missed some step.
Have a great day and greetings!
This laptop has had a rough time by it's owner (my cousin
), I was told that it was spilled with coke several times, but how it continued to work is a mystery. Last year I was told that the laptop turned off under load and I confirmed the same thing. I had stuff to do and I left it in a corner. Months later I tried turning it on, but nothing was powering on. I took out my multi meter and I found out that the dedicated Nvidia GPU has a short to ground by putting positive multi meter probe on the GPU power coils and negative probe on the ground screw. I removed the GPU power coils, idea being that I read online it's possible to convert these laptops to only use Intel iGPU. Once I removed the coils and powered the laptop on, there was still nothing. I thought hmm, maybe I need to reprogram the BIOS. I found a similar Asus model being X555LAB, which I believe has iGPU only. I remember I took this BIOS dump from someone, who posted this dump here in these forums. I flashed that BIOS using my CH341A programmer, of course taking a dump of the original one, and once I soldered the chip back on, the laptop turned on by my surprise. Even a reboot was fine. Then I realized I needed to copy over serial number, ethernet card MAC address, windows product key. And from there everything went from working to this day I am now, where the laptop doesn't show nothing on the screen. Basically what I did I took that BIOS image, I tried to understand how to transfer the MAC address and windows product key from the dumped BIOS into the new one, but without success. I made some mistakes by booting up the laptop with some solder bridges I didn't notice. I desoldered the BIOS chip a lot of times and reprogrammed it. Then I noticed that the laptop had developed a problem, where I turned it on, it took either a long time for the BIOS screen to appear or when it did appear, the whole UI was sluggish slow. Plus when I rebooted the laptop, nothing showed up on the screen, only the backlight turned on. I also noticed that there was no boot options available, my ventoy usb didn't show up and the HDD didn't show up. These were the last signs of life I still remember the laptop had. I was thinking maybe I had killed the BIOS chip, so I ordered 5 chips from aliexpress and I put the laptop to rest. Two days ago those chips came and I took out the laptop and turned it on. Now I had nothing on the screen and laptop took a good minute to even start the fan. I thought that's strange, so I programmed a new BIOS chip, same model number as the original did, and I soldered it on. Still nothing showed up on the screen. Basically something went horribly wrong, but it's possible that maybe this problem started because of me not knowing before that the ME code needs to be cleaned, as I did flash a different model BIOS. I don't know, maybe the PCH or the EC died or there is something I missed. Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it should help understand what component failed or I missed some step.
Have a great day and greetings!
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