Inspiron 1501 won't boot. Please help!

I have a friend you has a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. The computer has been operation normally up until the last week. Their complaint is the laptop will just "shut off". I asked them to describe what it does exactly. They say sometimes the screen will become a light blue color with small white vertical lines in it. Kinda like a pin striped suit. Other times, the screen would just turn black and the computer would stop running. The computer will go through the boot process and POST, but as soon as windows would start to load, the computer would cut off again.

At first, I tried to repair windows. That did not prove to be successful. After that, I tried to plug the hard drive to another computer and boot windows. That also didn't prove to be fruitful. I can access the hard drive as a secondary hard drive. I was able to get all saved files off the hard drive.

With this laptop, it came with the restore partition on the hard drive. I could access it through windows, but couldn't get it to come to the dell factory image restore option. The owners of the laptop do have the restore cds that came with the computer. I tried putting the windows cd in and reformat and preform a clean install of windows. I got through the install and then got that weird screen...

I am at a loss. Does anyone have the slightest clue what could be going on? I thank all replies in advance

 

By the way... I really don't know the specs of the computer. All I know is it has and AMD processor and Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit.

 

I would say run the Dell Diagnostics and see if it is able to find any part that isn't working.

 

Agreed with compsavy, when the Dell logo appears, press the button to get into boot options (F12 on my machine) then select diagnostics and run the full set. At this stage it's difficult to narrow it right down.

 

Thanks guys. I believe I ran that yesterday. I selected the option for diagnostics and it automatically ran a test that took maybe 20 minutes. I then was brought to the screen that gave the options of what test to run. Maybe it just automatically ran the quick test. I'll try it again today and post the results.