Strange shutdown screen

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Should I be worried about this screen?

Thanks

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Bottom-left of the screen shows what appears to be a burn through, likely caused by massive overheating and no thermal cutout to protect the device:

… so, yes, you need to be very worried.

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Ha! You got me. I patched an older — and yes, damaged — screen into the laptop to make the text in the image larger for the shot. But how do proceed from here? Press the F1? Close out with the power button? Or run screaming from the room? <!–more–>

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John Hampshire wrote:

But how do proceed from here? Press the F1?

What it’s telling you is that the stored values have changed for some reason (most likely a failing CMOS battery) and that the previously-computed checksum for the hardware is now no longer valid.

Pressing F1 will load some fail-safe default values that should be sufficient to get the device to boot so you can troubleshoot further.

If you haven’t made any changes to the hardware yourself then it may be time to replace the tiny CMOS battery that keeps the Real Time Clock (RTC) chip going when the device has neither mains nor main battery power, otherwise you’ll see this message every boot.

Example of a CMOS battery in an HP laptop:

Sites like iFixit.com should show the steps involved in replacing the CMOS battery.

Hope this helps…

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OK, what you’re telling me is that I can believe the messages contained in this error screen, and that it’s not actually an indicator of a ransomware or other malware attack. Fine, and thanks. That’s my query resolved!

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John Hampshire wrote:

it’s not actually an indicator of a ransomware or other malware attack

Nope… definitely hardware, not malware. 🙂

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