Dell 8600 won't start, probably my fault

My older brother gave me his Dell 8600 laptop back because he got a new one. Anyway, he sucks taking care of anything valuable he got, and so the laptop was pretty beat up. The bottom plastic was developing a series of cracks so I bought a new base on eBay. I basically had to take the entire laptop apart (per the 8600 Service Manual, including video card and processor cooling fan, etc) and I put it back together with a new base.

Anyway, now, when I try to power it on, the 3 lights come on for 1 second then just shut off. No fans spinning, nothing on the LCD, no hard drive access. Just lights up and dies. The charge light does show up when the AC adapter is plugged in. I'm sure I probably screwed up some step putting it back together, but can anyone conceptually think of what could be causing a total non-start? I would think at least the fans would power up even if I possibly damaged some components or seated the processor or video card incorrectly. Any ideas?

 

Apparently you suck even more than your brother at taking care of things

The fan doesn't come on until the CPU gets hot, so I don't think you would see it move immediately.
If there's not even HDD access it might not be getting past POST. My first thought would be the video card not installed correctly. IIRC that connector wasn't very sturdy.

You need memory, CPU, and video card installed correctly to get even the boot screen, so forget the drives and what not, just hook those up out of the case and see. Take it out of the case because you could have shorted something out. I hope you didn't do what was unnecessary and took the CPU out of the socket when you were moving the innards because you could've damaged that.

 

Re-seat your memory. Failing that, re-seat the video card. I don't think you had to take out your processor for this swap, but re-seat that too if the first two fail (and make sure you lock it back down). If it still isn't working... then something bad has probably happened.

 

were you able to resolve this issue? I have the exact same issue.

 

Since it takes so much time to unscrew and screw everything together, I've kind of given up and just left it in a closet for a while. I think I'm gonna take another crack at it (taking it apart and putting it back together) in the next few days. There's a few steps where I may have gone slightly wrong (unscrewing and screwing the processor not in the correct order as labeled in the guide), but I figured the computer would still start up and the BIOS would just show an error or something. Anyway I'll let you know what happens.