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XPS M1730 will not boot
I woke up this morning and went to check my E-Mail and found my six month old XPS M1730 sitting there with a blank screen. I left it on over night to download some files as I normally do. The power LED was on and my brick was working. I thought that it went into stand-by and was just hung so I hard-rebooted the system. That's when it all went sideways. The power LED comes on and so does the hard drive LED. The hard drive LED stays on for about a second and I can hear it spin up and the r/w arm moving. Then it just sits there.
I popped out the battery and did the Fn + Power button boot to see if there was anything the LED codes could tell me, the three LEDs for num-lock, caps lock and scroll lock all came on, then turned off. The power LED stays lit. The screen is blank but I can see the back light activate (it turns a slightly different shade of black.)
I followed some of the Dell support webpage's troubleshooting guides and I'm confident it's not the memory. When I take out all the memory I get the on-flashing-flashing LED code, so I know something's working. But the screen remains blank and the computer will not start.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks, Mike.
Berxerxes
2 Posts
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November 15th, 2011 10:00
Glad to be of help. If you're going to upgrade, you might try cooking the card first (nothing to lose but time). Your hard drive should be fine. I did end up killing my boot sector when I thought the problem was with my hard drive, but I was able to reinstall XP and get everything working again. Good luck.
Berxerxes
2 Posts
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November 15th, 2011 10:00
You may be up the creek, but here is a paddle. I had the same problem and it turned out to be the video card. The old video cards run hot and had a problem with bad solder connections. I replaced the card and have had no problems since (I also bought a cooler to keep the heat under control). I've read that you can cook the old card to remelt the solder, but I haven't tried that. Removing the card is a pain, but there are guides on line on how to do it. THe problem is that the cards are expensive and it's a tough choice to make when you'r enot sure it will fix the problem.
Clark1979
1 Message
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December 30th, 2011 12:00
Hello,
Did you ever get this fixed?
I woke up this morning with the same problem.
Thanks,
Clark
Zion51
2 Posts
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January 3rd, 2012 04:00
Hi Mike, It's been a while since I've visited the forum. In my case it was the mother board that went bad. I thought it was the graphics card overheating to begin with. In the end I had to bite the bullet and send it off to a third party IT engineer (as it's out of warranty). For £125 they'll run a diagnostic and fix any IC's that have gone down. In my case the mother board was not repairable and it was a case of having the laptop sent back with my £125 or pay towards a new MB. I chose the latter and it's been working fine ever since. It even plays MW3 with no problems. Terry.
SunnaH
2 Posts
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August 12th, 2015 17:00
What was the end result? I have a XPS 1730M and it is having the exact problem previously mentioned. It just would not turn on a few days ago now. There is no moving parts. It does not post or boot. The fan runs faintly, it powers up, but no beeps. The error code when doing Fn+Power is not documented in the Dell support. First all three blink and then the middle one A keep blinking. Is this be salvaged? I love this laptop.
On a side note if I do have to replace the video card I want to know if the motherboard will take a 9800M or must I replace the existing 8800M. The only thing is that only a single card was recognized in Win8.1 but both in Win7. Will Win10 pick up both of them?