laptop booting problem [Archive]

RobTi

09-09-2008, 22:53

Hi all
i have a dell inspiron 1300 that has started to refuse to boot, press power button and i get the 3 lights(no.lock caps lock etc) flashing and then nothing it switches off i can get it to boot sometimes by turning it on its side and repeatly pressing the power button.
I have stripped it down cleaned anything that looks iffy and reseted the cpu with new thermal paste and reinstalled both with windows and ubuntu
any ideas?
Thanks
Robert

latency

09-09-2008, 23:17

Funny you should say this, we had an Inspiron in the shop I work at with these exact symptoms, and that one seemed affected by holding it a certain way or pressing a certain place... Only change here was it wouldn't boot full stop, had power, but no post.

We came to the conclusion that the orientation was a fluke and wasn't affecting it- and we found that starting it with the CPU out got a different reaciton. We also found a suspicious dark mark on the bottom of the heatsink that smudged.
Only thing we could think of was that the CPU had burnt out, but the customer wasn't willing to risk us ordering in a new CPU when that might not be the problem, which was understandable.

We couldn't get a conclusive diagnosis without swapping parts that we'd have to order in, and the laptop being as old as it was, the customer decided to call it dead.

If you can get it to start only when on it's side, it must be one of the mechanical parts, I'd try removing the optical drive and the hard drive and seeing if it'll post.
That gets you down to CPU, Mobo or RAM...

Try swapping the ram around in different combinations if you can, to eliminate that, and you're down to CPU or Mobo. If you can that far and still no fix, I'm out of ideas, since that's only how far I got with this other one.

[edit- seeing cosmo's post, I used an electronics tester to verify the charger was working, and the power connector was properly soldered, both were fine in this case, but check yours, could cause these issues]