Dead'ish Laptop, second opinion required

Daemonic

My parents laptop (3yr old Dell Vostro) recently started acting up. Symptoms are:
- Refuses to boot with battery in place.
- Without battery will boot occasionaly but had to be left unplugged for at least 12hrs after a crash. Once booted will generally freeze after an hour at most.
- When it crashes it just freezes with some display corruption
- Before it crashed I managed to monitor temps of CPU & GPU and neither got above 60C and were averaging 50C. Fan is working fine too.

Havin a very ancient and limited knowledge of electronics I'm guessing a 'dry' joint somewhere on the motherboard, possibly on a capacitor due to the need to leave it so long to get it to boot again.

Anyone experienced similar? I'm thinking it's not worth the expense of repairing, is this kind of problem easy to find and repair?

Allyall

Have you tried updating the BIOS?
You can get that from the Dell website, under "Support & Drivers"

That should sort the battery issue, but not necessarily.

Freezing might be something to do with the hard drive, 3 years isn't that long, especially considering most places allow the extended warranty to cover 3 years. So i wouldn't imagine it is anything too serious, but then again, would need more info before i could say that for definite. Some Vostro's do have an issue with freezing, i'd try googling the vostro and model number for similar problems.
Also the OS.

Daemonic

Thanks for the reply.

The BIOS etc aren't an option at the moment because as of today it's no longer getting that far. Now when the power button is pressed, the 'on' light is illuminated, I can hear the CD drive being checked, and there is some hard drive activity but nothing appears on the screen. The screen is on as the backlight is on, just never get the option to F2 into the BIOS.
I had also run a chkdsk on the HD on one of the occasions it booted ok and no problems were found.

Googling the problem returned mostly generic answers, 'clean heat sink', it isn't that type of heatsink (long curved copper bar over CPU and GPU), fan vents are clean. Also saw a couple of mentions of reseating memory but that's been done as well.

Parents have pretty much decided to replace it so was just seeing if I was missing anything obvious.

BTW: It's a Vostro 1510 with Vista Home installed

Allyall

Black screen could be dirty memory, or, is anything plugged into USB port?

Did you try either stick of RAM in either port? i.e. leave only one stick in, and try it in both ports, and do the same with other stick. That might be your black screen issue, cleaning them with alcohol could fix that.

I'd still check the Hard drive, just to make sure that's okay too.

Battery problem i'd say is BIOS update.

Daemonic

Nothing plugged into USB ports. Will try the boot with just a single RAM stick in each port and see what happens.

As mentioned, I managed to get chkdsk to run ok on it, is there another test I should try on the HD?

Allyall

Daemonic wrote: »

Nothing plugged into USB ports. Will try the boot with just a single RAM stick in each port and see what happens.

As mentioned, I managed to get chkdsk to run ok on it, is there another test I should try on the HD?

Yep, if you can tell what make the drive is, you could use the manufacturers software.

Ultimate Boot CD should have most of them. Also plenty of other tests on it that you may want to run on your PC.

If you don't want to download the full CD image, you can scroll down on that link to "Hard Disk Diagnosis" (Just below halfway down the page) and you can download your manufacturers disk checker there.

Overheal

what type of GPU is it...

Daemonic

Allyall wrote: »

Yep, if you can tell what make the drive is, you could use the manufacturers software.

Ultimate Boot CD should have most of them. Also plenty of other tests on it that you may want to run on your PC.

If you don't want to download the full CD image, you can scroll down on that link to "Hard Disk Diagnosis" (Just below halfway down the page) and you can download your manufacturers disk checker there.

Tried booting with one memory module and none of the combinations got it to boot. As it's not getting to the BIOS screen anymore running a diagnostic even from CD isn't possible.

Overheal wrote: »

what type of GPU is it...

256 MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS (64 bit) Graphic Card

Allyall

Is your Vostro on this LIST?

Some Info HERE and HERE

Which brings you back to here - Boards.ie Thread

Daemonic

Allyall wrote: »

Is your Vostro on this LIST?

Some Info HERE and HERE

Which brings you back to here - Boards.ie Thread

Thanks for the links!

I thought the laptop was older than it actually is, a check of the original order received email (thank you Gmail for making me a mail horder) shows it was ordered on 30 September 2008, the final day for Vostro 1510's

I'll check the Dell & boards.ie links later when I have some more time to read thru them but thanks for all the help.

Overheal

Daemonic wrote: »

256 MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8400M GS (64 bit) Graphic Card

Had a sneaky suspicion!

Allyall

Overheal wrote: »

Had a sneaky suspicion!

They're popping up heavily at the minute! :eek:

Like a time bomb..

By the way, 14th of March seems to be deadline, so get your skates on!

DEADLINE REMINDER APPLIES TO ALL NVIDIA AFFECTED COMPUTERS

Might only be U.S. Though..

Overheal

vote with your wallet, dont buy nvidia products after this whole debacle.

Allyall

Overheal wrote: »

vote with your wallet, dont buy nvidia products after this whole debacle.

Yeah, also have my doubts about buying HP or DELL either the way the reacted to the whole thing.

Daemonic

Allyall wrote: »

They're popping up heavily at the minute! :eek:

Like a time bomb..

By the way, 14th of March seems to be deadline, so get your skates on!

DEADLINE REMINDER APPLIES TO ALL NVIDIA AFFECTED COMPUTERS

Might only be U.S. Though..

Pretty sure that's the deadline for the class action which appears to be US only.

From reading some of the other links it appears Dell extended the warranty for this specific issue either 1 year beyond the standard warranty expiry or to 5 years max, the sources conflict a bit.