Broken Vostro 1500?

Hi all,

The other night I was typing away on my Dell Vostro 1500 and all of a sudden it just cut out, the power button doesn't work and it seems completely dead.

Does anyone have an idea how I can find out for sure what part is faulty? I've opened it all up and nothing looks visibly damaged/burnt out.

I didn't have an extended warranty, I can't believe after 2 years it would just die. By the end the battery was rubbish (only kept its charge for ~30 mins), the screen had weird marks on it... and now the whole laptop is dead. Think I'll avoid Dell in future.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Does it short the power supply as well? It's probably some busted power circuitry on the motherboard and most likely nothing you can fix without replacing said motherboard.

 

Does the power supply LED still light up? Plug it into the laptop and see if the LED is still lit.

 

What exactly these "weird marks" on the screen look like? Do you see vertical lines? Green lines? White washed lines, etc?

It can be two things, Mobo, and also GPU. But if it's a GPU failure there will be warning on-and-off signals displayed on the LED panel. If total black out and no lights are even displayed, probably your motherboard is fried. Yes, things like that, it does happen. Not only just Dell.

Try removing the battery, and AC. Press and hold down the power button for 1 minute to complete drain all AC static in the motherboard. After that, do not insert and boot from the battery. Instead, boot from the AC only. If it doesn't boot, do the opposite and boot from battery only. Sometimes with this procedure it will work.

But from the way I see it, experience tells me it's motherboard failure.

 

This has happened with my Vostro before. I just left it for a couple of hours, removed the battery, unplugged it, and after putting back the battery and plugging it to AC power, voila. Back to normal. I really didn't know what happened and all I knew was that I was so scared to lose my laptop but miraculously it came back to life just like that and more than a year since that has happened I'm still using this ol' Vostro.