Should You Self-Repair Your Laptop or Send It to An Expert?

When your laptop goes wrong, it can cause an awful lot of headaches and one of the biggest is, do you repair it yourself to send your laptop to a professional for repair? Much of that depends on what went wrong with it of course.

Does Your Laptop Start Up OK?

• If it does but then it goes wrong, such as runs slowly or the screen freezes, it could be a very simple thing. Reboot your laptop and see if that works.
• Run a security scan to make sure you haven’t picked up a virus or malware from somewhere – some of these will make your system run a bit sluggishly.
• Uninstall any software or programs you recently installed. Reboot your laptop and see if the problem is fixed.
• Check if you have duplicate programs because these can take up space and slow things down. Uninstall both and reinstall just the latest version.
• Only have one anti-virus running on your laptop. Running more than one can cause conflicts to arise and can cause your laptop to crash altogether.
• Update your laptop. This should be done regularly to make sure you get all the latest security patches and to improve the performance of the laptop.
• Do a system restore if you have one set. This will take you back to a time before the problems started and it will let you see if anything you did recently could have caused the issues.
• Check for overheating. If your laptop crashes at random times, it could be that it is overheating. You can normally feel and hear this – the fans may be running overtime, or you may feel the getting extremely hot. If this is the case and you are confident enough, replacing the fan is a simple enough job.
• The motherboard beeps when your laptop starts. The number of beeps tells you exactly what the problem is, so check out the manual that came with the laptop or look up the issue on the internet.

If Your Laptop Does Not Start Up Properly or At All

This doesn’t mean the end, you may still be able to do something here.

• Check all the connections, inside and outside. If your laptop is no longer under warranty you can remove the casing yourself and check that everything is as it should be. NOTE: if you are not confident of doing this, don’t. It’s best to let a professional take a look. Although loose connections are not as likely on a laptop as they are on a desktop, they can still happen.
• Check your battery. If you are using your laptop on the battery, plug it into the main connection. If it all works fine, then your battery most likely needs to be replaced.
• Try to start your laptop in Safe Mode. This will let you run security scans and further investigations without causing any loss of data or any other problems on your laptop.

If none of this works and your laptop is still not working properly then it may be time to get professional help from a laptop service expert.