My aged Dell XPS l502x has suddenly stopped booting. Occasionally it starts for a few seconds giving distorded blue screen with something written in bold white but alien language. I think one or more hardware part of my laptop has malfunctioned but I can't figure out which one/s and how. Are there any steps that can be tried by self to test issues with Graphics, Processor, Motherboard, Harddisk etc which may have misbehaved? Or do I need to go to repair shop?
First and probably the easiest thing you could try, is to see if you can access your bios and see if the hard drive is listed in there, if the drive is not listed then you may want to check that first To access your bios, tap the F2 key when you start your pc, before windows attempts to load up
What did this language look like? did it have 0's and X's with letters and other numbers? Like:0X000000-xxxxxxx?
Possibly a dying or dead GPU/ display(you've to test it with external display to eliminate that guess). I would suggest you reflow it and see if it'll works at all. If not ,you are good to go and get another system motherboard to save yourself of the stress.
Also another possibility Check the video cable between the top screen half and the lower motherboard, If it looks gnarly. it may be the cable. Or a bad connection on the screen or the motherboard You can check this out by connecting a separate monitor and see what kind of video you get from that
+1 To separate GPU output from built in screen makes sense to figure if it's the GPU output or the internal monitor / cable to it.