Is my Inspiron 600m dead??

My daughter's Inspiron 600m (purchased 11/04)will no longer boot up; it just makes a clicking sound and there's nothing on the monitor.

Following some advice from other forums I removed the battery, hard drive, cd-rom drive and plugged in the AC adapter. The same thing happens - it clicks several times but will not boot.

One other piece of information - my daughter told me that the computer used to get so hot she could not leave it on her lap. I figured the battery was finally bad (4 years old) so I ordered a new one along with a new AC adapter because hers was worn and only worked intermittently.

I thought I might try plugging in an external monitor and check the internal fan.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

 

Does BIOS flash?

 

Sounds like the motherboard may be toast, and/or something has failed due to excessive heat.

 

Nothing on the monitor at all. I think I will plug in my desktop monitor and see if maybe the notebook's display is also toast.

Thanks

 

Could be a dead mobo / graphics chip...

 

Is there any way to know for sure if the M/B is fried?

 

I would remove the ram sticks (SODIMMs), wipe the contacts with alcohol pad, reinstall (one by one if you have two to eliminate if one of them is failing), and try to reboot again.

When the harddisk is inside do you see its activity light blinking when you turn on the laptop? If the power light is on and harddisk light is blinking and there is nothing on the screen, it might be the LCD panel or GPU. If an external monitor works it is LCD panel.

If the system looks totally dead without any activity when turned on, it is probably motherboard. There are used 600m motherboards available at Ebay, just FYI.

 

Thanks. I'll give those suggestions a try.

 

After some thorough testing last night, I discovered the following:

1. The laptop had a LOT of internal dust which I removed
2. Swapping in and out the memory chips allowed the system to boot

I decided to purchase replacement memory (1GB) and a new hard drive. The current RAM is only 512MB so I'm hoping that doubling the RAM will also improve performance.

The drive seems to be working but it's only 30GB and there is only 1GB free space remaining.

I'll see what happens when I replace the memory

 

I am glad the memory reinstallation worked out. Especially high heat, like in your case, causes oxidation at the contacts.

Upgrading RAM to 1GB will be a good upgrade for sure. Regarding HD, 1GB free space is too low; you definitely need a larger harddisk. You can not even defrag that disk with such low empty space.

I am still using an Inspiron 500m (little brother of 600m). Like you are planning to do, I have upgraded HD (20g -> 40G) and RAM(256M -> 1G), and additionally, WiFi card (802.11b -> g), CPU (1.3 Banias -> 1.8 Dothan), LCD panel (1024x768 -> 1440x1050), and bluetooth (0 -> 1).

Good luck!

 

Thanks for your positive comments; I really appreciate it. The 1GB RAM upgrade and 120GB drive upgrade should make a world of difference.

Take care

 

Yesterday I completely disassembled the laptop, cleaned it out throughly, then installed the new 12GB hard drive and 1GB RAM.

It then booted fine after many tries. Finally, late afternoon it started clicking again and would not boot.

For some odd reason I mashed the keyboard down when I turned it on and it started right up!!!

Could the keyboard have a short in it? Could it be the MOBO???

Thanks

 

It sounds like you have a loose contact inside. I would double check, make sure all of the sockets (keyboard, lcd cables, memory, harddisk, etc) are firmly seated.

 

I did; every connector that I could access was disconnected then re-connected.

Thanks