Hi  erlendbj,

Welcome to the Community,

If the adapter light goes off when you connect it to the system,it could be an issue with the charger/daughter board or the motherboard.Charger/daughter board has the AC adapter connector port and also has the a connector port which supplies power to motherboard.If replacing charger/daughter board fixes the problem it may not cost you much,but if you need to get the motherboard replaced that will be costly, as its the most expensive component on the system.

Let me know if you need more help.

Thank You

Hi, and thank you for the answer. Most helpfu

Follow up question: what is the easiest way to retrieve info from the harddrive if i decide not to fix the laptop??

Erlend

Remove the drive, mount it in an external USB case, and attach it to a working system by USB.

About the only way to reduce the cost is replace the board yourself - in the US, replacement boards run about $250.

Well, it looks like I have joined the club.  My XPS M1330 is doing exactly the same thing.  Suddenly, in the middle of browsing internet its gone blank and switched off.  I pressed battery indicator at the back and saw the battery was half full (or half empty, as you like).  Still, I connected power supply. The moment I connected it to the laptor - the green light on the charger went off.  Then I decided to use my branded car charger as I thought that hopefully it was the charger that was playing up and somehow influencing the battery and causing it to falsely indicate that it was charged up.  Wishful thinking.  In fact, it was quite a lot more disturbing. When I connected it to the car charger - it kept charging... and after a minute I saw thick smoke coming from the laptop, somewhere around power supply socket.  I switched it off and called Dell.  As the laptop is out of warranty (just over 3 years old) they quoted me over £400 for the engineer to come with new motherboard.  Needless to say, financially it doesn't make any sense.  Anyone has had similar problem and managed to rectify it without going into such expenses?  Or maybe all that's left to do is to post the video on youtube "Smoking hot DELL" ...

Which is probably about half price of the ones sold in the UK, as usual.. but thanks for suggesting that.  The only unknown is the amount of customs duty which would be charged on it.. but most likely it would be appropriate to make the overall cost in level with UK prices.