M1530 won't turn on but hard drive whirring

I'm having some problems with my M1530 - it won't turn on/start up. I was trying to restart it last night (using the Start button command) and whilst it powered down, when it powered back up the screen does not come on although I can hear the hard drive whirring. The power button lights up for about 3 seconds and all the volume/music control buttons all light up too, and then the lights go off but the screen remains dark. The hard drive keeps whirring however.

I also noticed that the battery light on the front of the laptop (next to the slot drive) flashes blue then amber then back again. I have tried starting up after 1) disconnecting the battery and reconnecting it; 2) disconnecting the battery and using just the AC as power; and 3) using the battery only as power, but nothing works.

Have I bricked my laptop or what? Anyone have any idea before I ship it back to Dell? I was thinking either the video card or motherboard may have overheated?

 

Did you call Dell? It could be the battery is dust. If still under warranty, call them and have them diag it over the phone. If under a year, they will send you a new battery.

 

Hey, realise this post is getting a bit old now but i bought a Dell XPS M1530 around February last year which up untill last night had been working perfectly.
When i got home today though i'm getting the exact same problem OZGOD has.
Tried the dell website but my warranty has expired so not sure where to go from here...?
Did you end up getting it sorted? If so did they tell you what was faulty?

 

maybe you should send a PM to OZGOD, I think you have to have more posts in this forum before you can send a PM though.

Anyway, did you try re-seating your ram?

How about taking out the battery and power cord, then hold the power button down for 30 secs. Put battery and power cord back in and try to turn it on.

 

Yeah did try see if he had any contact details up anywhere before i posted but couldn't see any.
Did Hold down the power button when i took out the battery but was probably more like 10 seconds than 30.
Haven't tried re-seating RAM, thought i'd try get some advice before i start tinkering with hardware (not that experienced in it).
Did find on dell website that holding down 'fn' and power button runs a basic diagnostic. Result was the first LED flashing and the other two solid which apparently means either the motherboard or processor can't be found?

 

can you re-seat the CPU?

This sounds pretty bad.

Maybe you should check ebay for a cheap CPU, so you can see if a new CPU will help.

 

You aren't getting anything? Not even the dell logo charging up? Most likely a faulty motherboard.

 

Could be the dreaded nVidia GPU. Hope you're still warranted and check to see if they extended the coverage for another year like HP did. BTW my HP did the same... blue lights on, HDD spinning, battery light at full charge but no video.

 

@moral - Well i tried re-seating RAM just in case and didn't yield any improvement (also tried with each separately just in case only one was faulty).

Thinking re-seating CPU is probably a bit out of my league even if I could find a cheap one, Dell seem to be pretty good at making their computers compatable with as little as possible so that might be difficult.

@m1n05 - Nope nothing on screen at all, just the tuanting noise of my hard drive and dvd drive whirring away.

@kenehi - Tried dell website first but when i entered my service code it came up straight away that i was out of warranty. Offered an option to renew it but i'm pretty sure they check and make sure ieverything is working before they let you =p
Also the blue light doesn't actually even stay on, it only comes on for about 3 seconds then turns off.

Think i'm just going to have to hand it over to a pro and hope it doesn't cost too much. Thanks for all help though, i'll let you know how it turns out.

 

Actually extending the warranty probably IS the best way to go. The Nvidia GPU on my M1330 died a couple of weeks ago and sure enough my warranty had expired in August. Called Dell and the guy said I could pay for a new motherboard plus the engineer callout fee (cant remember exactly but was something like £160 + £60 + tax) or I could buy a 2 year extended warranty for £120 and they'd replace the motherboard under warranty. Plus I'd have another 2 years warranty to boot.

After the Dell engineer replaced the motherboard and left the keyboard started acting goofy so he came back and replaced that too. I talked with the engineer about my situation and getting the extended warranty and he didn't seem at all suprised and said he sees that happen quite a bit.

So definitely call Dell's XPS hotline and see if they can help you out.

 

This exact thing happened to my 2 year-old 1530 last night. Fortunately, I still have 2 yrs. left on my warranty. Dell told me it's most likely the motherboard and gave me a dispatch #, saying that a technician would contact me in 2-3 days to schedule a time to come to my home to fix it. 2-3 days? I hope they call sooner than that.