I have a similar issue. When starting up my laptop, the power lights come on and the hard drive light flickers three or four times and then nothing. When I put a cd in, the cdwill spin a couple of timesand the hard drive light will fliccker again three or four times and nothing. Something that happens that typically doesn't happen before entering teh operating system is that I have to hold the power button down about fiveseconds for it to turn off. Befroe when it ran fine, I could just hit the button before getting to the operating system. I have a Compaq Presario R3000 Series latop.

Steps that I have taken:

Removed and reinserted the hard drive
Removed and swapped slot 1 and slot 2 RAM
Tried to start up with only AC
Removed the AC and Battery and held down the power button for a hard reset
Started up without a hard drive (thelast time I accidentally did that, I at least got a "Can not find book disk" error.

I was told that it might be the BGA RAM on the video card, but after that I was told that the graphics card shares the computer RAM butupon loking at the specs it does appear that the graphics has its own RAM. Iam still at a loss for what and where the BGA RAM is. Also, in looking at my chip and heat sink, when I took the heat sink off to reseat the cpu, I noticed that the contact paste was solid and brittle. Is changing the graphics out hard to do? Or should I replace the chip? It did run a bit without a fan a few months agofor a couple of weeks. Any input isgreatly appreciated.

Product Name R3410US
US Product Number PR472UA#ABA
Microprocessor Mobile AMD™ Athlon™ XP-M Processor 2800+ with PowerNow!™ Technology
Microprocessor Cache 128KB L2 Cache
Memory 512MB DDR SDRAM (2 x 256MB) at 333MHz
Memory Max 1280MB DDR SDRAM (1 x 256MB, 1 x 1024MB)
Video Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 4 420 Go
Video Memory 32MB DDR (dedicated)
Hard Drive 60GB (4200RPM) Hard Drive(i)