A woman called me because her laptop wasn't staying on. She said it would stay on for a few seconds and then go off. She also mentioned a clicking sound. My first impressions was that the hard drive had crashed. I asked her to bring it to me, which she did. This was a Vista Toshiba laptop.
I turned it on and after the BIOS logo, the screen went black just as she claimed. So I tried to boot of a flash drive or CD/DVD. If I could boot of one or the other and check the hard drive, then at least I could confirm that the computer was still working even if the hard drive had crashed.
So I tried going into the BIOS, but nothing was coming up on the screen at all. The first time I turned it on the BIOS boot logo displayed but then it didn't. I traced the clicking to the computer checking or trying to access the CD/DVD drive. I first thought this computer might be a goner, but then it struck me to hook up a monitor to see if it was the screen that was gone and not the computer itself.
Sure enough, the computer was starting up and the screen was the culprit. Most laptops have a connector, older models more likely VGA and newer ones HDMI, so you could hook up a laptop to an external monitor. This one had a VGA port. At one time you had to press a key combination to send the video to an external monitor, but it seems to be more automatic these days.
This is why I don't enjoy trying to diagnose computer issues over the phone. It's hard to see what's going on without some trial and error diagnosing. I have had people call me and say there computer isn't working. And usually it turns out they just can't get into Facebook or something.
So trial and error and you know what happens when you ASSUME something. Until next time.