Hardware I think an ant crawled into my laptop vent

Rabbid4240

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Recently my house had an ant infestation, after leaving and coming back, I turned my laptop on, logged in and the screen glitched out heavily and got the bsod, even the bsod was glitched. Do you think an ant could've gotten in it and if so, could it cause permanent damage?
20210802_171456.jpg
 

osaka35

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Only way to tell is open it up, clean it, reseat connections, and try again.
Fortunately, I actually have a better laptop on the way, do you think I could still transfer all my files to it?
Yeah, that's probably no problem, should be able to remove from the laptop...as long as it isn't soldered on hdd like some laptops do. I know i've removed a HDD from my old laptopt and plopped it into the second bay of my new laptop. Obviously, though, how you approach it depends on your laptops' hardware.
 
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The Real Jdbye

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Recently my house had an ant infestation, after leaving and coming back, I turned my laptop on, logged in and the screen glitched out heavily and got the bsod, even the bsod was glitched. Do you think an ant could've gotten in it and if so, could it cause permanent damage?
20210802_171456.jpg
That GPU looks like it's dying, does the same thing keep happening if you reboot?
Unless it's a hardware engineer ant, yes.

More realistically, it seems your display is dying.
Maybe, but a dying display alone wouldn't explain the BSOD.
 
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JuanMena

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Fortunately, I actually have a better laptop on the way, do you think I could still transfer all my files to it?
Well yes, it's easy to get back your files. Just get the SSD/HHD out and use a USB to SATA converter.
That GPU looks like it's dying, does the same thing keep happening if you reboot?

Maybe, but a dying display alone wouldn't explain the BSOD.
Well, considering I've had "BSOD" on my lap just by updating Windows, I think it can be triggered by anything in Windows 10.

I still believe it might be the display.
 

The Real Jdbye

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I forced it off, but after turning it on it won't even start up
Are you sure it doesn't start up or is it possibly starting up but there is no display output? I had a GPU fail on me in a similar way and it was down to blown capacitors. Got a garbled mess on the screen and after a reboot I had no display output at all. But I was able to check that it was connected to the router fine, so I knew it was still booting correctly. I don't know if your laptop has a dedicated GPU, the situation might be a bit different for an integrated one. There are bound to be some caps on the motherboard related to the GPU still though.
 

Rabbid4240

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Yeah, that's probably no problem, should be able to remove from the laptop...as long as it isn't soldered on hdd like some laptops do. I know i've removed a HDD from my old laptopt and plopped it into the second bay of my new laptop. Obviously, though, how you approach it depends on your laptops' hardware.
Kinda new to this, where can I go to get my data transferred? Best Buy?
 

FAST6191

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I have seen ants swarm and short things inside computers and electronics before. Rare (rodents and spiders are usually the culprits there) but far from unknown.

Most computer repair shops will offer such a service, mainly because it is easy and as it takes hours (99% of which is watching the percentage bar crawl up) they can charge a lot of money for it.

I tend to do it myself -- go buy what is called a caddy or a hard drive reader. If you can remove the hard drive (some particular bastards on modern stuff solder them in) then shove it into the caddy/reader, plug in the USB from the caddy to the new PC, if you can copy files from a USB drive to your PC you can probably do this. That said modern Windows might complain and you might then need to give yourself access to your old hard drive files -- takeown and iacls then being what you want in that case
https://appuals.com/takeown/
At that point it really is copy and paste.
The cost of the caddy is probably less than the cost of the service (if the caddy is more than $50 then something is very wrong), and if you are on a site like this you can learn those two commands (or at least look them up next time) so get to do the same for the next computer of yours, a friend, a family member, work or similar decides to do that for.
Similarly chuck a hard drive in the caddy and whoo extra external hard drive (probably with the added bonus of it being a nice drive rather than whatever WD had around the factory that day they can lie and say was your fault for dropping it when it fails in 8 months). Get a DVD drive and it will function as one of those when you have one of those modern magic space computers without such things (or an old computer where the drive got dusty years ago).

There are magic drive readers that might do better for dying drives than ye boring and basic caddy, these being the things that the specialist data recovery firms will have to try for you before fiddling with hardware and charging you fortunes. If by some miracle best buy have one of these then I would not trust them to operate it. For the most part unless it is do or die information then if a basic caddy (which includes using tools like photorec and recuva, possibly also trying from a different OS; I have had Windows drives work under Linux reading that Windows failed with, and Windows live boot things work where Linux has failed) does not do the trick then consider it gone. False hope that something is not gone is worse than it being gone.

If your original computer still boots then I will often instead just share the files as network shares and copy things that way, or set up a FTP server and copy things that way. If the hard drive works but the OS is dead then boot off a Linux live CD/USB and that tends to ignore any passwords or whatever you might have set up.

The most annoying part is in the modern world people usually want their browser settings to be transferred (stored bookmarks, history, passwords and what have you). You can search for chrome, firefox or whatever profile transfer though. It tends to be 1000x easier if the machine is running and you can use one of the backup and transfer programs.
http://www.oldversion.com/ has some good stuff if you need old versions to match and upgrade later, though most browsers should be able to source such a thing. Don't be afraid to use another browser's "import data from another browser" option either.

Also you now know why it is said "everybody forgets to take backups once". Also in case you were unaware rather than downloading 90 files and installing them one by one then allow me to introduce you to https://ninite.com/

With all you have now a can of air duster means you are local computer fixing whizz.
 
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osaka35

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Kinda new to this, where can I go to get my data transferred? Best Buy?
If your screen is borked completely, can your laptop stay stable long enough to hook up a USB? or run a live USB? and does your laptop have an hdmi port? so you can hook it up to a TV or something, copy files over to a USB or setup something like FAST6191 is talking about?
 
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Rabbid4240

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If your screen is borked completely, can your laptop stay stable long enough to hook up a USB? or run a live USB? and does your laptop have an hdmi port? so you can hook it up to a TV or something, copy files over to a USB or setup something like FAST6191 is talking about?
I have had a guy transfer an even older laptop's data to the one I use now (the broken one) so that shouldn't be a problem. The older laptop had a broken screen cable.
 
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