- Windows 11, Laptop 13 7840U,
One of the screws holding the mainboard in place somehow got torn out along with the plastic thread the screw was in. The screw then shorted a ceramic capacitor on the mainboard and melted it. After this my laptop has frequent crashes (every day or so, usually when under load I think?), and the laptop cannot remember windows hello stuff (fingerprint and pin, after setting them up both will be forgotten after abit), and cannot remember BIOS settings (like battery charge limits, igpu memory allocation ect) which will go to default. These settings seem to be forgotten after a crash or after several restarts. Occasionally after crashes the laptop asks for my TPM number and says something about there being a new cpu? Otherwise the laptop seems to work perfectly fine. I would be interested to know what could be causing the windows hello and BIOS stuff to be “forgotten”.
Below are two pictures. One is of the damaged capacitor, and the other depicts how i found the loose screw after it shorted the mainboard and caused a crash.
Should I straight up remove the damaged capacitor? (I would probably try removing it by tearing it off or twisting it to sever the one remaining connection with the mainboard) After dabbing off the black residue with blu tac, the damaged capacitor adhered to the blu tac and got lifted up, only being held to the mainboard at one end (the end that isn’t melted), so I dont think it is doing anything, and feel it may cause issues by perhaps intermittently contacting and passing current through the mainboard. Also does anyone know what the capacitance of this particular capacitor is, or how to find it? Is this capacitor redundant? (I would guess maybe not since it looks like a lone capacitor and not in a bank) Would appreciate any other relevant advice.