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OT p Computer (Laptop) might be dying

K

Kirk Grau

Member
Daughter has ~3 year old Dell Inspiron 1526 laptop. She went to do some work this afternoon and it won"t boot-up at all. Hit power switch and you can hear a slight whirr, but no beeps, flashing lights, any other signs of life. Took the battery out and pressed the power switch which occasionally fixes strange happening, but no change this time. Battery indicator indicates it is charging so it should boot up for her.

Of course she has no backups and work due tomorrow. Any brilliant thoughts on how I can save the day for her.

Thanks,

Kirk
 
What have you got to work with?

If you have another computer, try putting the hard disk in the other PC. If the disk drive won't easily exchange (e.g you only have a desktop), USB cables are available that will mate to laptop drives. You might be able to read her files off the laptop drive.

No video is strange. You would expect it to at least display a boot error. If you have a monitor, plug the monitor into the laptop and see if you get any video.

If you can get video, you might be able to get into the BIOS setup and disable "fast boot". That will give extended self tests, which might reveal the problem. At the very least, you can change the boot device and try booting from a CD. I think you have to hit F2 on this machine to get into the BIOS setup. Because of "fast boot", you have to hit F2 almost immediately after reboot.

A trick I use a lot is to try booting from a Knoppix CD. Knoppix is a bootable Linux CD. It's sometimes possible to read a bad disk using Knoppix.
 
take out the hard drive wrap in a plastic bag and throw it in the deep freeze over night. Put the hard drive back in and try it, if it boots up go to Carbonite and get the 30 day free trial, back it up and get a new hard drive, download from Carbonite and she will be good to go. I had one run for 30 days after I backed it up, had another that never booted again.(lost everything)I should have backed it up but money was tight.
 
Make sure all USB devices are removed. I just ran across an issue last week where a USB drive prevented a PC from POSTing, let alone booting to Windows.
Symptoms described could be a failing drive, but more in line with other hardware going haywire. You might be able to pull data off drive by removing and putting it something else.
I do this kind of stuff for a living; I hang out here to distract myself from it (not exactly working out well, is it? ;-D ). Email alert is on.
 
not quite sure how to fix it if you cant boot it up. If you could get it to come up start it in safe mode. However if your looking for a new computer i highly recommend a mac, from apple. I can say that i honestly have not had one lick of trouble from mine and use it almost constantly for college work. The price tag is high but the service is great and its made out of aluminum not plastic. The battery life on mine lasts about 6.5 hours of constant use.
 

It sounds like your power supply might have died. It goes until the battery runs out, too, then you are truly dead in the water. The partial whirring is the dead battery trying its best...

Is the connector right at the laptop end damaged?? If so, you also might be tripping an internal circuit breaker in the power supply. I've seen one before that you could unplug the power supply, carefully straighten the damaged portion of the cord - and then plug in the supply and run it until someone kinked the damaged spot, tripped the breaker shutting down the supply, etc...

Easy to diagnose if you have another power supply and/or battery to swap out...

Howard
 
Hold the power button down and see if it then boots after about 10 seconds.

Those Dells are funny that way; they are usually just thrown away when they start doing this.

Allan
 
Hold the power button down and see if it then boots after about 10 seconds.

Those Dells are funny that way; they are usually just thrown away when they start doing this.

Allan
 
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