Lap top help

Hootsmon

dell inspiron  was beeping every second or so non stop and would not start now it has stopped beeping and looks quite.....dead

separate power supply looks OK and appears tae be working...any ideas?

BRISTOL86

Sounds like a buggered battery to me. 

dogload

My first thought was 'stuck key' but if it looks dead... have you tried switching it on without the battery? (worked for my Acer but the battery was absolutely knackered)

Danny1969

The beeps are error codes ... telling you stuff like can't find GPU or memory

Whats the beep sequence as in one long 3 short for example ?

Danny1969

It doesn't need a battery to run ... it can run happily off the charger 

Try a hard reset  : Remove battery and charger - press and hold power button for 20 secs then release, plug in charger and then see what you got 

Hootsmon

if I recall the beeps were every few seconds without stop and no sequence....I think....

BRISTOL86

Danny1969 said:

It doesn't need a battery to run ... it can run happily off the charger 

Duh, I'm too used to living in Apple land!

scrumhalf

Can you hear any activity? Any souonds of disk thrashing that might indicate a hard disk failure?

Do you have an external monitor to plug in so that you can see if the display is knackered?

Hootsmon

no activity.....it's an ex lap top

Danny1969

It will attempt  to post with no harddrive fitted or a duff drive

If the screen is faulty you can still tell if the machine is running by pressing the caps lock button on the keyboard and seeing of the caps lock light comes on ... if it doesn't then the machine hasn't posted

Do what I said earlier, you can also try reseating the ram but most likely if it's something like an Inspiron 5030 or similar is that the  boards gone bad, normally the BGA joints under the GPU \ Bridge chipset 

webrthomson

On the up side most Dell kit you will be able to get the drive out of so if there is stuff on there you need you probably still have it!