F5N power-on problem

Hello all,

I have an old Asus F5N notebook. It used to work fine, then one day, we were unable to turn it on. When the power button is pressed, the power led (the green one with the light bulb symbol) blinks a few times, then it stays on, but the cooling fan doesn't start at all, and the hard drive and the ODD clicks repeatedly.

At first, I thought it's a battery problem, but it does the same when plugged in with the battery removed. Then I removed both the ODD and the hard disk, but nothing changed.

Today, I've disassembled the thing, and everything looks (and smells) fine inside, there's no physical damage, the fan and the heatsink are clean, and the CPU looks fine (also, there's some kind of plastic film around the CPU core, and it's intact, so I doubt the CPU has been toasted).

Once the motherboard was out of the case, I put the cooling fan and the heatsink back, and I've tried to start the thing up with no peripherals connected, and it still does the same thing.

I took a look around the net, but found nothing similiar to this. This forum is my last hope. Your help would be very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance, and excuse my poor english.

 

Did you take one stick of RAM out at a time, it could be faulty memory preventing it from starting up.

 

Video chip needs reflow. This is a rather easy thing if you have a heat gun or a reflow oven. If you go with it to a service you might get ripped off though as they will tell you that your MB was changes or stuff like that.
If you have a baking oven and you dont care risking it, you can take the motherboard out, make sure all unnecessary plastics are off and throw it in the oven for maximum 8 minutes at 200 degrees. Nothing should melt but check out few videos on youtube before performing the operation. Search for baking oven reflow. This is usually done with HP DV6000/DV9000 but should work with F5N as well. Again, do this at your own risk! I use a heat gun but I do this daily and the investment in a heat gun worth it.
The culprit is the video chipset and the extremely poor cooling solution for it used by ASUS.
Good luck.

 

That system from what I can tell has a NVIDIA GeForce Go 7000M which is an integrated card. In that case, reflowing would be a bad idea, especially since it's not an 8 series card with underfill problems that would benefit from a reflow.

 

Thank you all for your answers.

I've tried to start it up with one RAM module, with no effect. I've tried to remove the CMOS battery, and let it sit for a while, then I put it back. Nothing happened.

All I noticed is that when I press the reset button on the bottom of the computer, the fan starts up, then shuts down immediately. After that, not even the leds are working.

Also, after pressing the power button, and the power led starts blinking, the HDD led blinks as well, even with no HDD/ODD connected.

The video chip is indeed a GeForce 7000M, and strangely, it has an unique cooling "system": the metal static guard beneath the keyboard is also the heatsink of the GPU, I'm not sure if this is a safe thing, but since it was designed this way, it can't be helped. Now I got really fed up with Asus, when this computer was still under warranty, it spent half of its time at the local Asus service centre. After countless part replacements, it used to work fine, but only for a year, then this happened...

So, do you have any idea what to do now? Thank you in advance.

 

Update:

I had no idea what to do next, so I powered up the motherboard without the CPU. I know it sounds stupid, but I've already tried everything else. And without the CPU, it seems to "work" fine (at least I believe it does), the fan starts up, the power led comes on, then after about a second, it powers itself down. So now, it's safe to assume that the CPU is dead?