[SOLVED] Purchased a used laptop - Buzzing noises/power issues ?

Jan 20, 2022
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Hello all! Just bought a Razer with a GTX 765m off someone on offer-up for a couple hundred bucks. They, of course, assured me it had no problems. I did what I thought was a thorough lookover before handing off the money, but apparently it wasn't thorough enough.

Now I'm having a bit of buyers remorse, because it seems to have some problems - and I obviously can't get my money back. Hoping that y'all can help me and see if it is something I can fix for cheap, really hoping to use this for uni - considering I literally bought this because my last laptop (that I got from a retailer brand new a few months ago) died on me randomly while watching a youtube video.

I'm not tech illiterate by any means, I build my own desktops and know a decent amount about how computers work (as well as what causes them to breakdown) but I'm not particularly knowledgeable about laptops.
It's hard to contextualize what is related and what may be completely separate issues so I'll give a comprehensive list of everything I've experienced in the first 12 hours I've owned it.
  • I brought it home and, after installing chrome, it immediately shut off without any warning or BSOD. I booted it again and it, again, immediately shut down. I tried booting one last time and it hasn't crashed since then (been about 6 hours).
  • While unplugged, it will die within 20-30 minutes of operation, no matter what power usage settings it is on.
  • When gaming it emits a high pitched buzzing noise, this same noise also persists while scrolling on any website using an external mouse wheel or the onboard mouse pad. When gaming, the sound is ALMOST unbearable. It's not incredibly loud, just very staticy and high pitched. The sound persists with the speakers completely muted so it's not related to that.
  • There is a smell emanating from the charger, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it "burning plastic," it is CERTAINLY a smell that I wouldn't call normal - and I also am not SUPER familiar with the smell of burning plastic, so I don't know if I could pinpoint it with reliably high accuracy.
  • When I first started trying to configure it, I couldn't edit any settings within the NVIDIA control panel, luckily doing a clean install of all drivers fixed this.
  • When I got the computer it was in a refreshed state, and I checked to make sure there wasn't any lingering software from a bad restore, so no issues there.
If anyone could give me any advice that would be great, even if it's just "yes, this is a relatively normal thing with older laptops - it should be fine," I would be okay with that! If it's a power supply issue, I'm sure that'll be easy to find one I can purchase for pretty cheap considering the age of the laptop (Q4 2014 I believe).
If you need any information from me, please let me know. Thanks a ton everyone!
 
Solution
Wow. The laptop is 8 years old. I generally recommend replacing a laptop after 5-6 years. The tech upgrades so fast.

So anyway it sounds like you may just have power issues. There should be a way to check the battery health in the bios. I bought a 3 year old Dell Inspiron off ebay a while back that was in great shape. When running off battery alone it would drain in less than an hour. Probably more like 30-40 minutes. When it was plugged in it would pop up a message stating battery is extremely low and to plug in laptop. Then it would just turn off. I found the battery health in the bios and it showed the battery was bad and needed to be replaced. I bought a new unbranded battery off amazon and it worked perfectly. Laptop will now...

Jack10525

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Nov 8, 2016
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Wow. The laptop is 8 years old. I generally recommend replacing a laptop after 5-6 years. The tech upgrades so fast.

So anyway it sounds like you may just have power issues. There should be a way to check the battery health in the bios. I bought a 3 year old Dell Inspiron off ebay a while back that was in great shape. When running off battery alone it would drain in less than an hour. Probably more like 30-40 minutes. When it was plugged in it would pop up a message stating battery is extremely low and to plug in laptop. Then it would just turn off. I found the battery health in the bios and it showed the battery was bad and needed to be replaced. I bought a new unbranded battery off amazon and it worked perfectly. Laptop will now last several hours on battery alone and not turn off when plugged in.

If you do decide to replace the battery you should clean any dust out too and make sure the fan is ok. You may even want to apply new thermal paste to the cpu.

Lastly if the power adapter smells like it is burning it may be bad. You should be able to find a cheap equivalent off ebay or amazon.
 
Solution