M15x perhaps dead...

Hello everyone,

My Alienware M15x totally shut off in the middle of a Starcraft 2 match the other day. I wasn't sure what happened but it will not turn on afterwards.

The battery lights up as well as the charger.

Here's the weird part..

When I plug in the AC adapter, The M15x light turns on as if it is fully charged but when I press it to turn on, the lights go away.

I am also out of warranty by 2 months...

I have taken a look inside the M15x and found a lot of dust in the fan area and have tried removing my CMOS and re-seat the ram but nothing has worked.

Any suggestions?

 

Do you have another HD you can throw in it?

 

Not even the little alienhead lights up when you try to start the system?

 

I do not. Should I purchase one and try it out?

 

The only time the alienheads are lighting up is when the AC is plugged in. When I press the button to power on, the lights dissapear

 

i don't think its the hdd, prolly a bad mobo/psu.

 

I called Alienware and the guy wants me to purchase a 600 dollar motherboard + an extended warranty.

 

I was just suggesting that if you had one laying around you might swap and see if it worked. I've had a few hard drives go out on me over the years and the symptoms were always different... and it's a relatively cheap fix.

Hope not, but could be...

 

you can try ebay or the nbr marketplace.

 

Unfortunately, I don't even know what the model is for the mobo of the M15x. I've searched everywhere and can't seem to find it. Would you happen to know what it's called?

Usually when I punch in "M15x motherboard" it comes out as Alienware area-51 m15x mobo.

That's completely different right?

 

This doesn't seem to be a HDD issue. Like Inap said, probably a dead mobo. $600 inclusive extended warranty... pretty expensive imo. On ebay I've only seen one mobo that would fit, $250, see here. When you make an offer to the seller you might be able to get the price down.

 

Too bad he doesn't accept returns.

Thank you all so much for helping me!

I have offered on it and hopefully he will sell it to me! If he does I'll swap the mobos and tell you guys how it goes.

I appreciate it very much, thanks again.

 

You're welcome, hope it works out well.

Since there's quite some work and highly sensitive parts involved when changing the mobo I'd advise you use some ESD-protection, just to make sure you don't accidentally kill the new mobo.

 

Guys, I have blown two motherboards and in both instances there are no lights of any kind because power can't get to them through a dead mobo. It's the primary symptom the warranty reps use to diagnose the issue. It sounds like power is still present, but as soon as the POST starts it dies. Given the circumstances at the time of the shutdown, I would at least consider a dead video card. Could I guess still be a mobo irrevocably damaged but not completely dead.

 

I am not 100% convinced that the mobo went to crap- sounds more like an inverter/pwr issue. I am not sure about the current model of the M15x; however, I do recall the 1st gen m15x having a button on the mobo that would need to be pushed when such an issue as this would occur...

 

If you made the purchase with a credit card, see if your card offers an extended warranty. Many of them give up to an additional year.

 

What you COULD do is pop your current Mobo in the oven and try and do a reflow to verify that it's the mobo that's faulty, but I suggest only after you've ruled out all other problems.
Rev's post makes a lot of sense, so if you've still got your 260m lying around, try swapping it out.
Also, a new HDD could be a possible fix
Good luck!

 

Long post inc! Sorry >.>

That's interesting.. the exact same thing happened to me 4 days ago during my World of Warcraft play. Turned off... no lights... would not start.

I called up the tech support and they had me try, multiple times, various things to determine the issue and finally they decided it was the mother board (something I already decided myself) and told me that their system had been down for 3 days and it would likely be back up Sunday night (I called Sat night). It is now Wednesday night, and since I didnt recieve an email telling me it was sent out, I decided to call and find out what was going on. The rep told me that it was entered in on Monday but hadnt been sent out yet. He told me that it MAY get sent out tomorrow... but if not then it would not get sent until Monday because they only work on business days. I feel that an entire week to get a replacement even sent out is absurd, imo. So I asked to talk to a manager about confirmation about it getting sent out tomorrow so that I can be up and running by friday, but the best I got from him was that he put me at the top of the list but could not guarentee that it would be sent out tomorrow.

So I sit here... fairly vexed.

 

I've had this exact same problem twice in the past year so I can tell you exactly what the problem is. Your video card has totally pooped itself, essentially overheating is the case here. When I went through Alienware technical support, they couldn't figure out that the problem was rather the video card and not the motherboard. For the very first time they changed out the parts they sent a entire complete care package and replaced the motherboard only. Only after 3 hours of replacement, it still didn't work!!! So Dell sent the technician a video card, and wollah, it worked afterwards. So sorry to hear if you spent that $600, because it was a matter of just replacing the graphics card.