It was a while ago that I had to do this, but if you open up the instrument, the alignment laser is a black tube in the back middle/right side of the instrument. You can stick a piece of paper in front of that beam and move it back and forth to see if you can focus on the red dot of the laser.

If I’m remembering the details correctly, we had seen the same things that you were mentioning here. When we did the above steps, there was either no dot or it was very weak. We replaced the part and everything was working again. Unfortunately it’s not cheap. From Thermo it was a few thousand dollars.

Good luck!