PSU light turns off when powering up laptop

Alienware 18 is not powering up at all. Seeing strange behavior with the power supply that when you plug it into the laptop the light on the psu instantly turns off. Tried removing the battery and run straight from the psu but same thing happens. Cannot get the laptop to power up at all because of it as the battery can't get a charge but I would think it should still power up with the battery removed. Suggestions?

 

How new or maybe more accurately, how old is your GPU (Graphics Card)? Do you have the OSD driver installed for the laptop; OSD is the On Screen Display and this allows you to switch manually to the 18's igpu (Integrated, Intel's GPU) when pressing the Function plus F5 key. I ask you this because, this very thing happened with my 18; unfortunately, my Nvidia GTX 980M GPU primary card was bad; the 18 was running in SLI mode then and now, I just run it in non SLI with a single GTX 980M.
What happens, is that the PSU (Power Supply Unit) protects the system from shorting anything else out; maybe this won't be in your case. And, the light turning off, in turn, the system is protecting your PSU.

1st step would be probably testing the PSU. Let us know what you find out. Good luck.

 

It is almost 5 years old. What would you do to test the psu? Do you think it would just be best to remove both the primary and secondary 980m video cards and see if it powers up with them removed?

 

Unfortunately, I can't advise you on what you should do only because, I'm not certain of BIOS and gpu's and how they actually work; a guess would be to remove the cards and see if it powers up. I would say, if you had no previous issues with your PSU, I would think it is good; again, giving example of my exact instance where my PSU was fine. If I were you though, I would extensively search this forum and youtube for ideas and go from there. I don't think removing the cards and seeing if it runs on it's igpu would hurt it. If anything, I would think the 18's BIOS screen would boot up and I believe from there, you can set the BIOS for non sli and probably test either card for functionality.

Did you experience any flawed graphic performance prior to the issue now? Any heat issues that you are aware of? The heat question is a big one because, I really believe that's what happened with my gpu going caput. Good luck. Again, let us know what you find, we all can learn and help each other through our own misfortunes. Hope I'm helping you somewhat. I KNOW how frustrating and disturbing when something happens to our beloved 18's.

 

I am pretty sure that you have a faulty GPU. The board is detecting a short so it will shut your adapter off when it is plugged in.

I would remove both GPU's and then try booting. Keep a note of which GPU is from Slot 1 and 2. If it boots then try the secondary GPU in the Primary slot. If it still works then your primary GPU is dead.

 

Thanks guys. It did end up being one of the gpus

 

Was it the Primary GPU? I'm asking because as maybe a warning or precaution, in my case, a very short time later, my other GPU went bad also; at least, this is what the local PC repair shop told me and I had to buy a new GPU and just run my 18 in non SLI.

 

Well at least you found the problem. It sucks that your GPU is toast though. There are some people that can repair MXM cards but it can be tricky

 

Maxware79.....That's good to know that some can repair the card. Do you know if it's very costly?

 

I don't really know, sorry. I guess it would depend on what is wrong with it.

 

It was the primary gpu. Moving the secondary card over to the primary slot and it worked like a charm. Putting the bad card in the secondary slot made it not boot up again so that all confirmed it

 

i saw that 3 times before and the reason was for the first case is that there was a short on the GPU card so they way we did diagnose it is by opening the laptop and replace the gpu with an old one then it started normally. but i saw another case which was the same ( PSU green light turn off once we insert it in the laptop ) but the issue was a short in another part which required a replacement for the mother board. the third case was exactly the same but the laptop had 2 GPUs and one of them had a short too ..

 

oh sorry i just saw that u found out the issue