Laptops General - Read Only

[andiepi]

Cannot get my unit to power up. tried the battery reset. Can anyone help?

[jankerson]

Does it boot on AC power?

[HMKrieps]

You can remove the HDD, the optical drive and the MiniPCI Wireless card and try to boot it up. If you have two RAM modules, you can remove one of the two (you need one module to start the laptop). You can try to reseat the graphics card and if you are out of warranty, you can try to reseat the CPU (then you'll need some thermal compund to replace the termal pad on the heatsink).

[andiepi]

Does not power up on AC.

[williem]

With all the drives, modem, network card, and battery out and one ram chip in and hooked to A/C. Now hold that power button down for atleast 30 seconds. Did it start? If not, hold the "mute" button down while trying the power button, keep mute pushed in and power button pushed for 30 seconds. Any luck?

[andiepi]

My mother board is bad on my inspirion PC. How hard is it to replace the mother board myself?

[HMKrieps]

You can view the service manual at http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins8500/en/en.htm

It is not very hard to replace yourself, but the mainboard is the most expensive part of a laptop. You can find mainboards for your Inspiron on ebay or get one from Dell spare parts. For the moment I can't find a mainboard at http://www.parts-people.com/. Maybe someone else from this forum can tell another adress where to find spare parts.

[williem]

I just replaced mine with one off ebay (I 8600). It is a complete disassembly but do-able with average skill and tools.

Are you sure it is the motherboard? What happened when you held the power button in? what happened when you held the mute button and power button together? Any lights or leds come on or flash???

[SSW]

Our Inspirion 8600 just went blank, Have not been able power up since.  Tried some of the suggestions listed below.  When pressing the power  and the mute buttons the led lights do flash.  Does this mean any thing?

[djangelx]

Im having the same issue but it does go on sometimes but then it freezes and im back to square one again