My laptop is two years old. About a month ago, I started to have problems booting. The fan and keyboard lights would come on and sometimes the Dell logo, but then it would shut down. When I tried hitting the power button, it would do the same thing.  If I tried the RTC reset, that wouldn't work. Eventually, it the screen would sometimes flash white, then other solid colors red, blue, maybe green. After that it would usually boot just fine. I started to notice that I would have boot issues if the laptop went to sleep rather than shutting down.

At first, I thought it  was maybe the RAM, so I ran the diagnostic tests on that and then a mem86 test. That all checked out. while trying this, sometimes the only way it would boot up is by removing the RAM while it was doing the boot cycling. I updated all the drivers and the BIOS firmware.

Every once in awhile, the computer would just crash and then would have trouble booting.

I started thinking maybe it was associated with the battery somehow. The BIOS diagnostic shows the battery is healthy (98%). But it seems like if the computer is plugged in when I try to start it, it will more consistently start than if I try starting it from the battery or the power supply from the external dell monitor. (The monitor is one of the things that was added about a month before I started having problems. It only offers 90W and my charger is 130W, so I got warnings until I disabled them.)

I upgraded to windows 11 and then formatted the C drive and did a clean install with Windows 11. Neither helped.  I've run chkdsk and Dell support repairs and never find any errors. I've tweaked different bios settings like disabling the C-states or the lid switch. The clean install is using ACHI rather than RAID. None of that had any effect.

The problem is not consistent. Sometimes it will boot fine from the battery, monitor power, or ac. Sometimes it won't boot from all three.

Any help would be appreciated!