A Weird Problem (and a word of Caution maybe)

tswanshi

Hello,
I am a regular Ubuntu Touch user and recently i noticed a strange issue.
I use Ubuntu Touch on Pixel 2. I Use a Dell XPS laptop. Recently, I had my phone connected with my laptop through a usb cable, and my laptop was turned on and idle. On the phone i went to the Ubuntu Touch recovery, and i did factory reset. As soon as i did that my laptop screen went off. I was not even able to boot my laptop. Not even the boot screen would show up.
When i long pressed the power button, the keyboard would light up, but that's it, the system didn't boot. Screen was completely blank.
When i the Dell engineer analyzed it, they told me that the motherboard was not functioning/ it was faulty. They had to do a complete motherboard replacement (because in these laptops most of the components are a part of motherboard and cannot be independently repaired)

But I am clueless as to how such an issue might have occurred. Any ideas anyone??

Mario.CH

@tswanshi
Hi Tswanshi,

you will, unfortunately, never find out. Unless you could reproduce it.
Here are two of x possibilities:

Thesis1:
The motherboard happened to give up the "ghost" exactly on time.

You may also have heard of "exploding" or burning batteries, which brings me to thesis2:
The battery of the phone is old, and was in the charging cycle while you manipulated your phone (factory reset), thereby the charging electronics briefly lost control of the battery, and this then damaged the motherboard of the computer.

Of course there are countless other possibilities.

Cheers Mario

tswanshi

@mario-ch Thank you so much for your reply!!

MrT10001

@tswanshi USB ports have resistors that act as fuses so a USB port should in essence not blow a motherboard. It sounds like the graphics part of the motherboard probably decided to coincidentally give up the ghost. Being a DELL, this is not wholly surprising as the majority of DELL laptops I have repaired usually are overheating due to the bad design of the heatsink and fan and the lack or too much of the thermal compound they use on the CPU and graphics chip.