Calling all Dell Laptop Gurus

[dom_xbox]

Ok.. so ive got a Dell Latitude C500/C600 (thats what it says on the base).

the problem is when powered on ALL LEDs (numlock/caps/scroll power hdd etc) come on for about 5 seconds then go off.. no beeps, they dont blink either..

Ive taken out RAM, CPU, battery, hard drive, cd-rom and still the same..

I though it might be the video card (as its a modular design on this one..) First card did nothing, no LED activity (was from another faulty latitude). SO i bought another card just to make sure and this does the same as the first one..

It has to be the motherboard, but does anyone know where i should be looking?? caps? resistors? i can hear a whining coming from a cap near the power adaptor socket... could i be answering my own thread??

[GoNz0]

tbh unless i can see something burnt out im fighting a losing battle. you can try the cap you can hear but i doubt it will fix it.

always worth ebaying for a model with smashed screen in this case.

[mosherben]

a guy at work had a problem with simular symtoms on a Dimension 640m- it took about 45 mins before it would finally turn on. It turned out to be the DVD drive causing this problem.

Sounds like a motherboard fault throiugh.

[GoNz0]

yeh if there was no high pitched (im broken) whine i would say try the BIOS reset. 25% of the laptops we get in power up again after shorting the BIOS.

[dom_xbox]

Hi guys,

thanks for the replies.. im looking on eBay atm but it seems im bidding against a lot of people with the same problem.

the caps look so small so i dont think ill be able replace it easily (not that good with soldering).

i just got another two parts from eBay and they both do exactly the same thing

Noooo!

[GoNz0]

you should have a word with http://cgi3.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....erid=ukgemstar