Laptop boot problem

[kasavien]

Hi all,

My housemate has a laptop that will not start. On pressing the power on button the fans spin up but after a few seconds it powers down again, the screen doesn't come on, so i can't get into the bios. Does anyone have any ideas what the problem may be or any possible solutions.

Thanks in advance

Andy

[ExceededGoku]

it could be faulty ram, have you tried reseating the RAM and/or testing with some other laptops ram?

[Splash]

Take the battery out, connect direct to mains then try again - this will eliminate any battery issues. If it still does the same I would say it's refer to vendor time, especially if you get no POST beeps/errors.

Out of interest what make/model?

[kasavien]

The laptop is a packard bell easy note M5. I managed to get it to boot somehow last night and this morning, possibly by holiding down insert on boot, but to be honest i was randomly button mashing a bit. Last night it BSOD'ed and was unable to boot again until this morning. Looking in the event viewer the most recent event error was as follows:

error Situation Invalid root in registry key "HKLM\Software\NEC Computers International\ClickMe\QuickRun\"

Could the above have caused the problem?

Unfortunately when i saw the BSOD i didn't write down what it said, because it was late and i was tired.

Anyway. any further help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

[Splash]

That'll be the some of the preinstalled Packard Bell software. How close to York are you? I might be able to have a shufty this weekend if you want.

[kasavien]

I'm actually in keighley at the moment, i may be home to my parents, who are about 16 miles north of york, at the weekend though. Not sure if my mate will let me have it for that long though. Looking at the properties of the my computer the laptop appeared to have an odd amount of ram, something like 486mib. its also running norton internet security which has expired but i doubt this could cause a problem, as rubbish as it is.

[Splash]

That'll be 512Mb of RAM with an amount dynamically assigned to the VGA (ie no dedicated video memory), hence only showing that amount as available.

May well be worth backing up and rebuilding though - does your mate still have the recovery media?

[kasavien]

Its not actually his laptop yet, he's thinking he might buy it, providing he can guarantee it will work, hence why he's given me it to look at. I'm a software engineer hence in his eyes i must know how to fix it. I'm not sure if there are any disks to go with, i was also thinking that a full reinstall would help things. I'll talk to him tonight about it and let you know what he says, to be honest if he doesn't end up buying it i may buy instead. I think the guy thats selling it wants £100, not sure if this is reasonable or not, i'm not too hot on laptops, i've only had experience with PC's before really.

[kasavien]

I think the laptop needs a full install, it seems to be running ok at the moment, but there is a lot of bloatwear on it which needs to be remedied, does anyone know how easy it is to reinstall windows on a laptop, is it much different from doing it on a PC? Do laptops need specific drivers?

Again help is much appreciated

Thanks

Andy