Dead XPS M1350 - Won't Power up fully, Flashing Leds. No screen

Hi all, its my first post, I am new here, pardon me if I am in a wrong section.

A friend gave me an XPS to have a go at, its not powering up, I do minor repiars myself. But I am lost here, and don't really want to bugger it up totally if I can help, so I have checked for obious things like power getting to the mother board etc. All seems fine thus far.

Symptoms:

Press power button, the power button itself illuminates, blue lights (led legends) to the right of power button light up and sequentially scan from left to right and back again, the blue legends to the left of this power button also light up and 3 of them with a padlock symbol remain On with the middle padlock symbol with the legend A starts to flash rapidly, and the power button blue back light dies out, leaving just the 3 blue legends with padlock lighted up all the time with the middle with the letter A flashing. I also hear the DVD mechanism noise briefly as you would in all computers,

I have also tried removing both rams out in case one of them became faulty or started to draw too much power, again this has not achieved anything, I also took out the battery, made no difference, I also took out the HD in case it was drawing too much power and the power supply was shutting down, again no luck .

But at no time does the incoming power supply goes under any undue load, and remains around 19V dc.

Screen is totally dark, absolutely nothing,

so please any ideas, whether it is a processor fault or a faulty mother board?

Thanks in advance.

 

with the memory did you try booting off a single chip and try it in both slots, then try the other memory chip in each slot ?