I have recently started work as an IT support person in a charity. We have about 3-4 Dell computors that cant be more then 2-3 years old im not sure what model. when i try to turn any of these on the hard drive starts up and the power supply ect. however it does not seem to be getting past that. There is no boot screen and no evidence of it trying to do anything apart from that. i have checked all the connections ect and i can not find anything that could be the problem. if anybody has heard of this problem and has any idea as to how i might fix it it would be much appreciated.

i have that exact same problem and i have no idea how to fix it. let me know if you come up with something

However on a less destructive Note i am 99% sure that its the CPU chip causing the problem so you could always just replace that.

Hi I read your post and had to reply. I am also an IT technician, a while ago I came across this problem, looked on the net and found a rescource It explained that somewhere on the laptop is a catch, I think it was the same catch that hibernates the laptop when in windows. I didnt fix the laptop I gave the info to one of my fellow tehnicians and they fixed it.

The thing is I have a Dell Inspiron 2500 doing the same thing right now. I turn it on the light comes on for about 3 seconds then it switches off.

I know from the resource I read before that this is a very common problem with Dell laptops. But one thing I can tell you is this don't buy no more parts your laptop will come back on in due course it maybe that your CMos battery is low so try and replace that.

The laptop I am having problems with is one I have had for over a year. So I know, another thing you can try is plug in an external monitor this sometimes gets it to work also.

My dell didn't start for awhile also so I swapped out the HD and booted from floppy and cd.

I'm kinda in the same situation. With consolidation of services .. I'm now an outdoor instructor/computer guy. I work on Dell P3 desktops, Ibm celeron desktops, toshiba laptopsand old apple PPCs ... AND Ive been working on this troublesome ... Dell Inspiron 2500 P3 512 LG DVD Laptop. Heres a list of the quirks: It had XP on it but it kept on having BSODS, in Win @K pro it ran pretty stable for awhile but ram and overheating problems caused it to bsod and crash. I tried fedora, slackware, and knoppix on it and that was better... I finally loaded the latest ubuntu on it... Its running pretty stable now and it plays dvds again... so I keep it in my home shop and and experiment ... I cleaned the cooling system and reapplied the thermal paste or grease to it. I've actually been using it for a backup computer at work.

Synopsis - Computers gone wild, bad hard drive, ram, and overheating