Laptop totally dead?

I have an IBM ThinkPad R31.
Windows XP, SP2
1.13GHz PIII
384MB ram
30 GB Hard Drive

It has been a pretty good laptop so far, however, about 3 months ago it had some hard drive problems and so I ordered another one to replace it. I installed it, used it and everything was fine.

About a week ago (and still today), I couldnt' boot up my laptop.

I push the power button. The power light comes on, the cd-rom searches for a cd, and the hard drive spins up, and the fan spins up.

After that, nothing. The screen is black, the hard drive does not have any activity.

If I plug it up to another monitor, it does not receive a signal. It just acts as if the bios has died.

My warrenty went out about 6 months ago, so no help from that front.

Does anyone have any helpful hints? Thank you so much.

 

Sounds like the mobo since you are getting juice and it won't connect to the external monitor. You should probably get it checked out.

 

Hm. Considering the laptop is several years old, I am guessing a bad MB is a deal breaker.

I am still open to other, more positive opinions (Whether they be truthful or not)!

 

You might want to post this on ThinkPads.com. They are obviously a ThinkPad based forum and have people more learned about ThinkPads than myself. There might be a simple solution I don't know about. As a last resort, you could probably buy a R31 on eBay for less than a new mobo. Sell the old one for parts.

 

I would recommend not taking it to a laptop repair shop or anything like that, you would get charged an arm and a leg to replace a mother board -- could be that the hard drive controller part is gone too, which essentially means replacing the mobo.

If you've got a budget to upgrade or buy a new laptop and aren't stuck on the R31 you might consider shopping around too. 3-4 years is a good run of life from a laptop, they tend to entropize and fall apart after that time.

 

I think this one is at its end, but I'll have to check out Thinkpads.com and see what they have.

Thanks for the advice guys.

 

You might want to get it checked out anyway then decide if the repair is worth the price. Provided everything else is in shape, a 1.1GHz PIII is still a pretty good notebook if you are not doing anything demanding.