I decided he was kinda thinking out loud One think I've noticed about laptops, is that particular problems follow particular models. In other words the parts that first go bad on one are likely to do much the same on the other, maybe not always, but it is certainly common. One case in point, I gave my niece a laptop for college, and after about a year the video stops working. On checking it out, the ribbon cable from the video card to the main board had came loose from the soldered connection on the card. After doing some research I found it was happening on almost all of them. I located some on Ebay, but in queries as to the condition of the cable, got only very vague, unpromising replies. I only found one board in the whole wide world I thought i could trust, it was a still boxed replacement from Toshiba and it was in Australia, i was lucky to even get it, because they weren't being made any longer, and almost all of them had that problem