Laptop freeze - need help diagnosing

Hi folks. A few weeks ago my Dell Studio HDD failed. The DVD drive had also failed some time ago, so I couldn't reinstall Vista straight away. So I got a replacement DVD drive and keyboard from ebay (as the keyboard ribbon got damaged cos I was careless when removing it) and replaced both in the laptop, along with a new drive (although I was also able to recover the old drive in another PC).

So now when I start it up, it starts to go into the Vista install, as far as the 'Select your Language screen', but then stops responding. The HDD light remains on, but it's unresponsive in that the mouse pointer won't move and ctrl+alt+del doesn't do anything.

I've also tried starting it with the GParted Live CD, and it loads ok, but then freezes again. Also tried it with an Ubuntu CD and same thing.

So I'm now stuck as to what's causing it. The CPU fan runs ok, so I don't think it's overheating, although it does look like symptoms of overheating Anything else it could be?

Really need some help to get it fixed.

 

try testing your memory

If you have 2 DIMMs try each one at a time in each memory slot.

 

Thanks. I actually tried this last night and it complained about the clock generator not being available, and no keyboard detected.

So I had a look at the mobo around the keyboard connector, and I've damaged one of the small chips near it when I was removing the old DVD drive (it's quite annoying that you need to completely dis-assemble the case to remove the drive!). Looks like I'll need to get a new mobo

 

definitely sucks

at least you know the problem, hope the mobo. doesn't set you back too much