Dropped Laptop, works "fine" but audio is shot

Question

Due to a stupid oversight of where I place my laptop, I found it fallen when I returned to my room. The power plus was not in and the computer had shutdown due to battery reaching critical levels before falling.

1) I still feel warm air coming from the vent and it's not hot.

2) There are no cracks on the screen NOR the case, This is a Toshiba laptop.

3) The DVD drive broke out of the computer and tore out the single screw holding it in place (but I don't care about this too much).

4) I hear this very soft irregular popping from the left speaker only (same side as disk drive) and the audio does not work. However, when I plug in headphones the audio works just fine.

5) The laptop started up just fine with the power cord and recovered windows. I'm writing this post on my laptop.

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I understand that I should have this looked at by a professional, but in the immediate future where this is not possible, is there anything I should worry about such as Hard Drive/ Motherboard damage?

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Update: I just restarted the laptop and it booted normally. I also ran a java program through the windows command prompt and the fans picked up perfectly and the program ran without a hitch.

Answer 1

Motherboard damage is already done - you say the audio is toast, which means there's some damage on the part that manages the audio, but that's pretty minor and since you can use your PC just fine I'd say that the critical parts of the board are still intact and it'll work fine if you don't care about the audio.

You can try a load test with OCCT (do the power supply test) and see if everything works fine; your machine shouldn't crash or overheat (for overheating it's not a big issue, it may be caused by a loose heat sink, you can fix it by opening your laptop, removing and cleaning the heatsink, putting some new thermal paste on and putting it back together, as for the crashes it may indicate serious damage to the board).

For the hard disk, it depends if it was running at the time of the accident, if the laptop was on standby/hibernation when it happened then the HDD is fine, otherwise it may be at risk, you can try CrystalDiskInfo (choose the standard edition) and see if your HDD's SMART data looks okay, otherwise back up your data as soon as possible and replace the drive.

Of course, if we're talking about solid state drives none of the above applies as they don't have any moving parts in them, unless you break them in half they'll still work perfectly.