6 month old Dell Laptop no longer booting. What are my options?

Balfe

A few days ago my (relatively) new Dell Inspiron laptop began acting up and not loading Windows 7 correctly. I performed a couple of system repairs and this, by and large, fixed the problem for a couple of days but it seems that now it's completely dead. System repair says it can't fix whatever problem there is and it won't even load to the Windows password screen. I'm not an expert on this, but I have a feeling that the motherboard has failed.

Seeing as I only got the laptop brand new from a branch of PC World last October, I assume it's still under warranty. What are my options for repairing this as cheap as possible? I'm not 100% sure I have a receipt anymore, but can I bring it back to the point of purchase and they would have some sort of record of it?

Thanks in advance for any help here, I'm pretty unsure what to do next.

Duggy747

Sounds more like your OS is fecked moreso than it being a hardware problem.

When it goes to Startup Repair, click cancel to stop it from trying to fix itself.

When it stops you should see an option along the bottom, written in blue, allowing you to see advanced options.

From there, you'll see a variety of options like Command Prompt and System Restore. The last option should be a Dell Recovery which will restore your machine back to it's factory state.

I think Dell's software also allows you to save any of your files and moves them to a Backup folder before erasing everything else.

Balfe

Thanks for you help. I will try this when I get home from work later this evening.

I did show the laptop to a software developer friend of mine and he was the one who came up with the motherboard theory when he looked over it, although we didn't open it up the case or anything like that.

Under the assumption that the problem is actually a motherboard issue and not an error with the OS, what would my options be with getting repairs/replacements from Dell under the terms of my warranty?

Again, I very much appreciate the input on this.

Duggy747

Well, you have a 1 year warranty with them so if you did have any kind of hardware problem you just get in contact with them.

Don't open the case and fiddle with it or else you'll risk voiding the warranty.

zef

If you bought it in currys/ pc world they will have you on the system, they do with all buyers of laptops for their year warranty.
It therefore should not cost you anything to be fixed.
I had the exact same situation a while back. Best to get it sorted asap if you did not purchase an extended warranty .

Balfe

Thanks Zef. So should I call the PC World I bought the laptop in, or just show up?

yoyo

Could be hard drive failure? anyways its in warranty so get PC world to sort it out

Nick

BostonB

if you can get to System repair screen its unlikely to be the motherboard. In my experience, many developers usually do not know much about the hardware side or even the OS side of computing. Usually they can look up a machines serial and see how much warranty is remaining.