Is my laptop dead? :(

[Andeh13]

I have a Dell Studio 17, its about 2 years old and still under their extended warranty. It worked fine last night, turned it off & tucked it down the side of my bed like I always do.

Came to turn it on when I got back from work & the keyboard backlight turned on & i heard typical laptop like noises...but the screen stayed blank. Tried turning it off (unplugging it) and rebooting it but still nothing. I have tried a different charger, with the battery, without the battery. I have also tried the HDMI output & cycling through the display modes incase it was the screen, but still nothing

I can't hear the HDD spin up, nor can I eject the CD drive (via the 'touch buttons' or the keyboard short cut.

Can anyone guess as to what it could be, failed Motherboard? It is under Dell warranty so I'm not panicing (yet), however I have replaced the keyboard & been using a Studio 15 charger for the last few weeks after I was sent the wrong one. Neither have caused any adverse changes from what I can tell.

Thanks

Edit:

Has anyone had any experience with the dell warranty service before? I have the 3 year at home one AFAIK, and checked their website so its got plenty of it left.

Also, I have a couple of possibly suspect films from my university days, could this cause any problems with Dell?

[Pob255]

Not their "at home warranty" their business warranty was very good, ether new day or two day depending on part availability.
You're paying for the warranty so use it. They'll probably ask you to do some silly tests that often have nothing to do with the issue but are on the "script" so grin and bare it.

Off hand, if you have no output from the hdmi then it sounds like the gpu has died.

Only other thing that I can think of that they would ask you to do is unplug the laptop screen lead and plug it back in (normally you have toe remove the keyboard and top section of the bezel above the keyboard to get to it.

The charger is probably the same, these things are pretty standard, they just seem to change the connector regularly just to be awkward.

[catman]

Don't know if you have sorted this out yet but since I have had the same laptop for 2 years I thought I'd give my input.

Expanding on what Pob said, you could try turning it on for 5 minutes to make sure the OS has time to boot fully if it can (if the HDD is actually spinning) and then use the VGA port instead and press 'Fn' + 'F8' to activate that output.

Also, you could plug some speakers in, turn them up, and plug in a USB device and see if you can hear the beep Windows makes when it detects new hardware (assuming you are using a MS OS).

If you can see something over the VGA port then you have something wrong with the laptop screen, or if you can only hear something then you have something wrong with the GPU. If you get nothing at all then it could be a broken (perhaps cracked) motherboard. Either way you will have to contact Dell.

Hope this helped in some way, good luck!

[prehensile]

a note about tucking to side of bed, if you grip the top of the lcd under the latch to move it around it will tire the silicon where you grip it and one day the lcd will split

[Andeh13]

Thanks for the heads up!


Right, new challenge. laptop is dead still, 4 dell engineers couldnt figure it out, so they are sending me a new one. In the meantime, I still want to try and get this one working. Some might say I'd be in the mood to drag my heels as it took dell 2 weeks to deceide I am elligle for a replacement laptop....

The symptons persist, turn it on & backlit keyboard lights up, HDD spins gently, CPU fsn doesnt move..and laptop doesnt boot, no beeps nothing on screen or secondry screen when connected.

Dell replaced the Motherboard & power supply, new charger, RAMs been checked but still the laptop doesnt boot up.

Can anyone think of any suggestions?

[Kumagoro]

Sounds like a classic case of dodgy gpu needing a reflow

[Jasp]

I see you posted over at another forum I frequent, I would of thought they would of had a answer, what GPU do you have? if its the fabled 8600m that's your problem right their as they are prone to failure on a massive scale. Got to agree with Kumagoro on this one.