Dell Inspiron 9200, not happy...

Help anyone,
Last night I went to switch on my dell inspiron 9200 and the initial screen with the bar along the bottom came up but subsequently froze.I powered down and started up again and it did the same thing.After powering down for the second time, nothing came up at all, although certain lights came on ( bluetooth,power,batt etc ) but then it switched itself off without booting. Any one got any ideas?
Cheers in advance.

 

It might be an overheating issue. You can check the air that comes out of the vent, or the palmrest/bottom surface, to see if they are abnormally hot.

 

Nothing like that, this was a cold start up. Laptop has not been used for a couple of weeks.

 

OK then. You can also try booting from a CD (such as your Windows XP/Vista CD) to see if it boots normally, if it does, your HDD is probably corrupted. That might be fixable with formatting the HDD, or it may be physically damaged.

Some questions:

1) Could you provide some details? In particular, which Windows version you use would be helpful. Computer specs (processor, RAM, ...) wouldn't hurt either although they probably do not relate to this case.
2) Did you recently install some software? In particular third-party software or something you downloaded? In other words, is it possible your laptop got infected by some virus or other malware?

 

I intend to try these suggestions either tonight or tomorrow night, so will input any more info as and when available.]Thanks for the suggestions....

 

No problem. Hope they work...

 

Got one more suggestion; try re-seating the memory and/or running with DIMM A unpopulated or with DIMM B unpopulated (I mean try both combinations, not just one).

 

Ok,
As far as it goes, its running XP pro, has a pentium 4 cpu, 1.5 Gb ram, and 60Gb hdd. Tried booting from cd last night and absolutely nothing.On initial power on I had the opening dell screen with the bar across the bottom and again nothing happened.Powered off and on power up same again ,the little bank of icons where the bluetooth light is came on along with the power and batt symbols but then it just switched off.I have stripped it down to bare bones last night and tried a different cpu, but nothing happened at all.That may be the cpu, so will put original back in tonight.Apart from that I`m totally at a loss.

 

I`ve just returned home and put it all back as it was and have taken a photo of the screen I get when firing it up, but am not sure how to load the photo on here?

 

Upload it to imageshack.us and the copy/paste the link they give you.

 

Thanks. Hopefully this should be the link and the photo!!!

 

Its been sat with this screen for the last 30 minutes..

 

Something hardware wise has toasted itself.

When my alienware was doing that it turned out to be an issue with the DVD drive.
Removing it fixed the problem.

At this point what you need to do is find a screwdriver, rid yourself of static, and start pulling parts out one at a time.

First though, turn it on and pound ESC, on some computers that will get rid of the screen with the bar and give you the real bios POST screen, which will almost certainly be more useful then a logo and a bar.
If you still don't get anywhere, see if you can find the little metal battery that saves the bios info and pull that(after pulling the main battery and disconnecting from the wall), wait a few minutes, then put it back in.

If that doesn't work, pull one stick of ram out (if you only have one, move it to a different slot).
Then pull the other out and put the first back.
Then disconnect the dvd drive, then disconnect the HDD.

If you have it stripped down to where it's a single stick of ram with no drives or Mini-PCIE cards or anything else still hooked up and it still won't get past that screen, the motherboard is likely toasted.

 

Well done that man!!!! after removing the cmos battery nothing, but when I removed a ram chip and swapped the other in its palce away she went. Fantastic. Many,many thanks....

 

Awesome, that's good to hear.

For giggles, try putting that ram back in and see if it works.
It may have simply been a bad connection, or it may have fried itself. Testing will tell.

 

Strangely enough I did, and it still worked so goodness only knows why it played up!!!

 

It is relatively common that just opening up a laptop, messing around, and then putting it back the way it was actually fixes issues. In your case the memory stick was probably slightly dislodged from its correct position.

I have fixed several HDD failures, display failures and battery failures like that.

 

I have to say I`m amazed really, that something so simple could have been the problem. Mind you its a handy thing to know should anything like this crop up again!! Having had problems with my Acer too I was beginning to think I was jinxed and would have to solely use the desktop!!

 

Yeah, RAM is extremely finicky about how it's seated in the slots. A while back, my Studio would not boot at all. The power would turn on, but that's it. The display wouldn't come up, the fan and hard drive never moved, no BIOS, nothing.

Fixed by popping the memory DIMMs out of their slots and putting them right back in.