Inspiron 1501 issue...

The wife rebooted her laptop last night and the laptop never turned back on. The power light comes on. The Caps Lock light comes on solid. The Scroll Lock blinks real fast. If I run off the battery for a bit then plug in the power cable the battery light will come on indicating it's charging. The CPU fan will spin up and down depending on heat, seems to work normally. Even the DVD drive will spin up a bit and you can hear it accessing the disk a bit. But no picture EVER comes on the screen and the Windows chime never sounds.

I read one post that said if the Caps light and the Scroll light are both blinking the modem is faulty. Well, only one is blinking, but I pulled the modem anyways (it's under the RAM access door). Still didn't boot. I've tried swapping the RAM out with some of my spare RAM, nothing. Tried pulling the BIOS battery, nothing.

Any ideas? Or is it a dead deal?

 

Try unplugging the cord and removing the battery.

Then press and hold the power button to to drain excess power for about 30 seconds or so.
Plug in power cord and try the power button and see what happens.

You did the CMOS battery.Since that didnt work im guessing the above wont either but still worth a try.

Do you have a external monitor to connect to it?

 

Thanx for the idea. Still didn't work.

I have 2 24" LCDs hooked to my desktop...but neither one accepts an old VGA plug. They are both DVI only.

I'm wondering if just a dead CMOS battery would cause this issue? Could it?

 

So, you have a partial error code there. Full error code would be NumLk, CapsLk and ScrollLk. Post what the NumLk is doing as well.

Based off of the partial error code and assuming you don't have any external devices hooked up, I'm betting you have a faulty motherboard.

Essentially, do this: Strip the system down to just the motherboard and processor. Disconnect everything else. If you get the same code, the board is bad.

This might help: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1501/en/sm_en/index.htm

 

Nothing is plugged in to it. Just the laptop and the power cable. No external mouse or keyboard or anything else. No USB drives or anything else.

Num lock is not lit up at all. Caps is solid, Scroll blinks and Num is off.

 

I've tried booting the laptop with the modem pulled, the RAM swapped out, the HDD pulled, the CMOS reset. Everything but the optical drive basically. Always the same thing.