- Here are some of the common issues you'll encounter
with mobile devices.
The first is no display.
Well, if you have no display you can't do anything
on the mobile device.
For the laptop, there's several things that you can check.
And for the mobile device,
there are several things that you can check
and they're gonna differ a little bit,
but for both of them you wanna make sure
that you try power cycling the device
and also make sure that you have the battery connected
for both of these.
Now, and make sure you have a charge as well.
Now for the laptop, you can make sure,
you can check if it's plugged in
and see if you get a display
and then you can check your settings.
We mentioned that if we press the function key
and the F4 key, that we can change how the monitor
is displayed from the laptop to an external monitor,
maybe it's only displaying to an external monitor
and you have to change that with the function key.
Another possibility is the brightness on both of these,
maybe the brightness is all the way down
and you're in a very well lit area,
or the sun is very bright
and so you can't really see the screen,
even though it is on,
so you can check the brightness as well.
And then finally on the laptop,
you may have to actually go in and, you know,
see if the problem is internal.
Could be that the flex connector from the display
to the motherboard has been disconnected.
It could be that the display has indeed gone bad.
So there's a couple things to check there,
but generally with no display,
it's because the device isn't getting power,
or it's not on, or the battery isn't connected,
that type of thing.
So check the basic first.
Then you have dim display.
Well with this, for both types of devices,
you want to check the brightness setting first
and you know it might be set to auto like this is,
and that could cause problems
when you get into a bright area as I mentioned before.
A dim display could also be because the power is low.
If you're running on battery
the automatic power saving settings
will usually reduce the brightness,
so that you can still use the device at low battery power.
And another possibility is that the laptop
might have an actual problem.
It could have a problem with the inverter.
And we said that you can check that
with the flashlight trick, check that with the flashlight
in a dark room and see if actually you can see the screen
a little bit.
Could be the inverter has failed,
could be that the backlight is going bad
and that could cause a dim display.
And when the backlight fails altogether,
that would cause a no display error.
Usually the display itself doesn't fail.
It's pretty rare unless it's been really physically damaged.
And that requires a lot of force nowadays
to really damage one of these to the point where
it won't work at all.
So, no display, dim display, always check the basics first.
Check the power connections.
Check the battery is connected.
Check the brightness setting
and then you can move on to the internals.
A flickering display.
Well, flickering display normally doesn't happen
on a mobile device
and it could, but it's rare.
You might see it on a laptop
and a flickering display could be a cause
of a couple things.
One, it could be because of the settings in windows.
You might have a problem.
The resolution might not work properly
or perhaps the color depth is too low.
And the application you're using will flicker.
The best thing to do is to power cycle the devices.
If you get a flickering display, that's the first thing.
And then turn them off, disconnect them, charge them fully,
and then restart and see if you still have the problem.
And with the laptops and the smart devices,
you can go into safe mode, or you can go to safe boot
and there you might be see that, okay, in basic video mode
you don't get that flickering
especially on the laptops running windows.
If you go to safe mode, you'll be at 640 x 480
with a low amount of color quality.
And you might see that the flickering goes away.
So you might need to upgrade the driver
on the laptop or change the resolution or color settings.
So a couple possibilities for that.
It is also possible that the flex connector
just has a loose connection.
And once you make that solid connection,
you lose that flickering display.
So a bunch of possibilities with that
if you have an external monitor
and that's flickering, could be because the cable connection
is loose between the external,
say the external HDMI or Thunderbolt port
and the external monitor.
If you can't display to the external monitor,
the first thing you're gonna wanna do is check
that function key and F4 on the laptop
and make sure that you have the configuration right.
That's the number one reason why the laptop won't display
to an external monitor or projector
and it holds up conferences all the time
because you have all those different options.
You have the option to display on the laptop screen,
or display only on the external monitor
or stretch the desktop across to an external monitor
or copy the display to both.
So you have to make sure that that is set properly.
Then you check the cable connection
and make sure you're connecting
to the right port on the external monitor.
And also on the external monitor,
if it has multiple inputs for video,
you might need to manually select which one you're using
on the on-screen display on that monitor.
And you might see that on a projector as well.
Now let's say the touch screen is non-responsive,
well if you're on a mobile device,
like a smartphone or a tablet, that's a problem.
You're not gonna be able to do much of anything.
So again, the power cycles the best thing to do to start.
Shut down the device, disconnect the battery if possible,
put the battery back in, charge it up, fully charge it.
And you know, then see if you still have that problem.
Now the touch screen might be fully non-responsive.
And you know, in that case, you do that power cycle
or you might just have intermittent problems.
And if it's an intermittent problem,
you could try cleaning the screen.
And then you want to take a look
at the screen protector that you're using.
Sometimes they can wear out a little bit.
Maybe it has failed or maybe you need a screen protector
or maybe you need a new one.
So try cleaning the screen
and see if that's a possibility for you.
But again, if you have to,
go ahead and power cycle the device,
then you wanna try and do resets on these devices.
If you can do a cold reset and then back up your data,
you know you might be able to fix the problem.
If those things don't work
you'll have to take it to an authorized repair center.
Now as far as the laptop goes,
the touchscreen can actually be disabled
on laptops that have a touchscreen.
So you wanna check that that's enabled
in the device manager,
and then beyond that you wanna make sure
that it is clean and, you know, it's performing properly.
And finally sticking keys.
We're not really worried about sticking keys
with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets
because they use an onscreen keyboard.
And if there was a sticking key on the onscreen keyboard
it'd probably just be because the screen was dirty.
It would probably just be because the screen was dirty.
And so the real issue here is with laptops.
If you have one sticking key,
could be because the key was damaged, physical damage,
or it could be because someone spilled some coffee
or soda on there.
And a lot of times you could just clean it
and it'll fix the problem.
You can use a little bit of that, 50/50 mix
of isopropyl alcohol and water
and really clean the key good
and press it a couple hundred times
while cleaning it to see if that fixes the problem.
If it doesn't, then you know you're gonna have to go in
and open up the laptop, pull the keyboard out,
and then maybe you can clean it at that point
because, you know, here you can get little bits of coffee
and soda and whatever in the crevices around these keys.
And so if you take the whole keyboard out
you could clean the whole thing carefully
and then put it back in.
And if not, you'll have to replace the keyboard.
So there's a little bit of a troubleshooting
common mobile device issues.
The display issues and the keyboard issues
and the touchscreen and touch pad issues.
Those are fairly common,
but always check the basic stuff first.
Always check the common culprits.
Make sure the battery's connected.
Make sure you've tried power cycling the devices.
Make sure you have power to the laptop if necessary
and use those function keys
to check the if you're working with an external display
and check the brightness and that type of thing.
So that's it for this sub lesson.