Vostro 1500 Dead as dead can be...any suggestions??

Also does anyone have suggestions to replace the motherboard?

Bought a Reconditioned (by Dell) motherboard on ebay for $150.

Took about 30 mins to swap it out.

Add another to the list of dead vostro 1500.  I have exactly the same symptop 1) died out of nowhere 2) power supply green light goes off when plugged into laptop 3) Died at 20 months of use 4) just plain dead!

Called Dell and they tranferred me around for a while until on person suggest I send it in and get it repaired (out-of-warranty).  Seems like the Mobo is dead and to replace it (time and cost) does not seem to be worth it since i purchased it for $399. 

FYI...My vostro 1500 did not have the nvidia GPU.

I also have a vostro 1400 that I bought around the same time and very worried about that one as well now.  Bye Bye Dell and hello HP, Lenovo, etc...

I am having the same issue with a dead vostro 1500 (cannot power up with or without the battery and ac power adapter and the green light going out when plugged into the laptop) and am in NJ. Can you let me know where the guy who fixed it lives?

Thanks!

I took apart my laptop and didn't see anything "physically" wrong with it such as the "cracked" capacitor as a previous post.  I gave up on trying to fix it.  Good news is that I picked up a Lenovo laptop for a great price and loving it. It doesn't run hot like the vostro even with an nvidia video card.

Also, since I purchased my vostro with an american express card, American Express covered the warranty for an additional year.  The process was pretty simple and Amex refunded 60% of my purchase price.  Wish Dell had customer service like American Express.

Given the yearly fees and sky-high interest rates on card that don't have them, AMEX can afford to be generous.

You can count me in as another disappointed Dell customer (soon to be FORMER customer). Our last desktop also failed pretty quickly and wouldn't boot up. Now, 23 months after purchasing the Vostro 1500, it died in the middle of typing an email. It was definitely not too hot because I'd just had it on a few minutes. I rarely used the laptop and always kept it safe and in a desk drawer when unused. I did use it alot the other day for work and maybe it hit the overheated spot then. I bought a new AC adapter and found out that wasn't it, so no more $$ spent on this. (Mine does have the green light STAY on when it's plugged in).

It's a shame Dell won't support their products like they used to. I'm thinking of getting just a netbook or something because I just use the laptop for work at home.

They are all garbage now! I have a 2 year old Studio 1735 and the same exact thing happened. One second I was on the Internet and then dead. Totally dead. It's my last Dell product I can tell you that much. A $1500 laptop dies after just 2 years. Garbage. Over $400 for a new motherboard.

Hi Guys,

This is my first post in Dell community. I am another guy to get added up on this list of dead Vostro 1500.

I am in India and got it from my sister in US as a birthday gift 21 months back and it died today in the same way as in this discussion. I am very much worried on how to proceed. I have all my personal snaps and important documents in it. More than anything this was a gift from my sister. At least it cud have lasted for another couple of years.

Luckily I am going to buy a SATA to USB adapter to back it up in my desktop. Like wat Sam told, If it involves a capacitor change issue, It wud be well and good.

Moreover, the local service people are too cunning to milk money from ppl who go to them. Could any of you tell me wat you guys followed or wat was the exact thing that went wrong in the Laptop which resulted in making this laptop dead.

Plz reply and someone plz help. Thanks a looooooooot in advance.

Cheers...Raj

I just had the exact same thing happen to my Vostro 1500. To add insult to injury, the tech people who worked to retrieve my data said that the mother board was shot and parts of the hard drive melted. I called Dell to try and figure out what could be done, but as soon as they heard that my warranty expired their tech support specialist "nicely" hung up on me. I called again and asked to speak with a supervisor. I was told that the supervisor was busy and my problem was not the kind of problem that he/she could deal with. Seems like Dell customer support is non-existent. This is the last Dell I will ever own, for sure.

My vostro had a problem in this same area but it is the motherboard that got fried under those capacitors. has a line burnt in the board about 1" between those six lookalike capacitors on the board.. looks like there is some circuits in the middle of the board. the motherboard must have more circuits in the middle that burnt on my board..

same here laptop about 18 to 20 months old and died, so I pulled it apart found the motherboard fried, it looked to be the circuitry of the board itself..bad dell

The same exact ting happened to me on 1/30/2010.  The computer was purchased in 2007.  I tried all the suggestions that I could find on the internet to no avail.   Also, as  eiffelorama wrote, the green light on the power cord go off when plugged into the computer.  I guess another Dell goes into my crawlspace.  Come on Dell you need to do a better job!!!!  

hello everybody...and guess what? yes, my vostro 1500 is dead aswell, happened last nite, got it ilate late 07 but never used much untill about three months ago, since i started school again. well i was in the forums for a MMORPG, and boom, screen went black.

i tried resetting the Rams sticks underneath the keyboard and under the machine, it started to turn on, got to the windows log in....and darkness again.  this morning i tried again, and im getting the same things that has been talked about thru out this thread. i only found this thread by trying to google solutions for my problem, only to find that many have it and all have been unanswered by Dell.

Well my Vostro 1500 just went dead as well. Exact same scenario. It amazes me that all of these people have had problems with Dell and no one from Dell cares to do anything about it. The company I work for (who buys about a computer every year) will no longer be purchasing Dell products. And I will be sure to let everyone know to not buy and products Dell makes.

C-ya Dell!

Add me to the list of people affected. I was using my Vostro 1500 (with nVidia graphics) on Saturday night. The system was running hot because I was playing a game, but nothing beyond normal. About 10 minutes into it, the system just died. No shutdown, no error, just black screen and no power. I looked at the AC adapter and noticed the green light was out. Disconnected it from the laptop and replugged it in and the green light came back on. The second I plugged the AC adapter into the laptop, the green light went out. Tried with and without the battery, and no dice.

I took the whole thing over to a friend's who had a Vostro 1700 (same AC adapter). My adapter worked on his laptop, but his would not power mine. So the laptop is  definitely at fault.

The system is also about 7 months out of warranty, so no help from Dell when I called today. Based on some of the posts here, I decided to open it up and strip it down and look for any sort of heat marks or blown capacitors, but I didn't find anything. I even went and plugged it in with nothing but the motherboard in the case, but no luck.

Fortunately I was able to pull the files off the hard drive just fine (removed from laptop and hooked up to the desktop via a spare SATA connection). But otherwise I've got a fancy doorstop.