Inspiron 1501 failing to boot

Hi all,
my daughters Inspiron 1501 (just out of guarantee) when switched on the keyboard lock lights come on briefly as normal, the hard disc runs up, the screen illuminate after a few seconds then the following characters momentarily appear top left of the screen- RS485/M BR#23931 -the screen blacks out momentarily then illuminates again.
Does anyone know what the message tells us . It took lots of restarts to get the full message and there may be mistakes in it.
Have you experienced this or do you have any ideas. I have tried switching on with hard disc, dvd, memory keyboard and wireless modem removed. I have also reseated the cpu.

rieverjohn

 

I believe this is an error with the GPU. when powering on your notebook, press the Fn & power button at the same time to launch diagnostics. This should test all of the vital parts and will let you know if there is a problem with any specific one; but I'm betting GPU

 

Hi Fragilex,
did that and got a series of flashing codes on the three lock lights, too fast to record so I shot a video of the sequence with a digital camera, this I imported into windows movie maker hoping to replay in slow motion, I was only able to show it a frame at a time and still couldn't make any sense of it. Thanks for the help anyway. Is there any way of finding a list of fault codes as an idea of what to expect may help.

rieverjohn