Dead Laptop?

Troxck

I have an old Dell Inspiron 1300 which when last checked (1 month back), would turn on. Now, when I press the power button, just the two front LEDs turn on for a few seconds then that's it. I've tried all the "take the battery out for 30 seconds" type things and nothing. The RAM, harddrive etc are all fine. What could it be?

Torqay

Troxck wrote: »

I've tried all the "take the battery out for 30 seconds" type things

That alone does nothing, you should also disconnect the power supply and then press the power button for a complete discharge.

Troxck

Torqay wrote: »

That alone does nothing, you should also disconnect the power supply and then press the power button for a complete discharge.

By "type things" I mean everything people suggested online, I've tried and none of them have worked.

johneire31

Sounds to me like the cmos battery which is inside laptop on the motherboard sometimes soldered to it, has probably died while it was sitting idle. This battery powers the cmos chip that holds bios instructions to start your laptop. As is, when you turn on the laptop it first goes to the chip for information on how to load the operating system and sets up a few parameters. if the battery is dead the starting up process will come to an end as the computer doesn't know what to do.

You can of course get a battery, stick it in and see what happens, usually when a cmos looses power it will reset to the default settings, these may not be the settings your manufacturer had decided to use, they are the chip manufacturers defaults and a lot of the time they are the same. You can go into bios to see what the story is. You can also download a bios flash from dell and update it (carefully, extremely carefully or you will turn it into a brick).

j

Torqay

If the CMOS battery is "dead", the laptop should still come to life when power (battery or mains) is available, although reset to default settings.

Troxck

Torqay wrote: »

If the CMOS battery is "dead", the laptop should still come to life when power (battery or mains) is available, although reset to default settings.

Thanks for all the information but it doesn't boot up, the fan makes no noise and nothing appears on the screen. The green power LEDs come on for a few seconds and that's it.

johneire31

Try a cmos battery, they are only a few Euro, then you know if that is your problem or not. Your fan settings are controlled in the BIOS among with your hard drive recognition and dozens of other vital settings which are held in the cmos which is powered by the battery.

If battery goes dead, BIOS information resets to default, The default is the default of the BIOS Manufacturer, not of Dell. DELL may have tweaked the BIOS from that supplied by the BIOS manufacturer for that particular model, meaning if it is not using the tweaked version, basic information instructions may not be available for the computer to load the operating system.

j

Troxck

johneire31 wrote: »

Try a cmos battery, they are only a few Euro, then you know if that is your problem or not. Your fan settings are controlled in the BIOS among with your hard drive recognition and dozens of other vital settings which are held in the cmos which is powered by the battery.

If battery goes dead, BIOS information resets to default, The default is the default of the BIOS Manufacturer, not of Dell. DELL may have tweaked the BIOS from that supplied by the BIOS manufacturer for that particular model, meaning if it is not using the tweaked version, basic information instructions may not be available for the computer to load the operating system.

j

Thanks, I'll look into it and update ye.