Samsung RV511 Power, nothing else

Howdy folks,
I have a Samsung RV511 that has an issue.
The machine will power on, sort of. When I plug it into the AC adapter, the "plugged in to AC" light in front of the touch pad lights up. When I turn it on, the blue light on the power button comes on, as well as the blue led in front of the touchpad. The CPU fan runs, but that's it. No video on the screen or on an external monitor. I removed the hard drive, memory. Still no beep or anything. I've verified that the AC adapter is sending 19 volts.
Any thoughts?

 

Did you replace the RAM, one stick at a time? The computer will boot into the BIOS without the HDD but it does need some RAM to start. If it only had one RAM module then you need to borrow one in case bad RAM is the problem.

It's a long time since notebooks gave beep codes to show problems.

John

 

Thanks John,
I did not try a new ram module. I tried without the ram figuring I would get a beep code about "no ram".
I will try a different ram stick.

 

Looks like it was the memory.
I put the new ram in and it still wouldn't boot. Same results.
I had to take the CMOS battery out of the motherboard for a while, but when I put the battery back in, it booted normally. I tried the original ram and it wouldn't boot. Put the new ram back in, booted.
Now to fix the BSOD problem....

 

Thanks for the update.

Is the BSOD a previous problem? If so, it might have been caused by the old RAM slowly going bad.

John

 

The BSOD is new.
The first thing I tried was a system recovery from the samsung recovery partition. Then a full recovery. Then reinstall win 7 from DVD. Then a new HDD and reinstall from win 7 DVD. Usually it gets to where I enter time zone, user etc. then starts to load the desktop and gets a BSOD. I've tried unplugging from the MB; keyboard, trackpad, power button module, display, DVD connector, basically every connector on the motherboard, one at a time. Still BSOD. I'm thinking of updating the BIOS, but how is that done from a thumb drive?
By the way, this machine will run from a Ubuntu USB flash drive without any problem. I've also checked the HDD with SpinRite, and Hiren's Boot CD. Machine will also run XP mini from Hiren's boot CD.

 

Oh, and I have a different CPU, but I can't get the laptop to work with it. Same model etc and original i3-380M.

 

Does the Windows installation always BSOD at the same point? If so, that suggests a hardware problem. Otherwise I'm wondering if there is some thermal instability when the installation process gets the CPU busy. One way to eliminate this possibility will be to run something off the Linux flash drive that will heavily load the system.

John

 

No, BSOD is at different times. Sometimes right after login. Sometimes when loading desktop. Also, BSOD stop codes vary. I've had 000000A, 1E, 24, 50, 7E.
I've finally gotten it to boot in to safe mode. I just kept rebooting after BSOD. Now it will boot into safe mode reliably. Installed latest drivers from samsung web site. Still BSOD in normal mode.
What program do you recommend to look at the .dmp files?

 

Perhaps there is some driver incompatibility. Do you have drivers at least as new as those offered by Samsung? There's also all the updates to Windows.

See How to read the small memory dump file that is created by Windows if a crash occurs regarding reading .dmp files.

John

 

Yes, I have the latest drivers. I restored from the samsung back up partition, and then downloaded the drivers on a different computer. When I finally booted into safe mode I updated all of them. I haven't connected to the internet to download windows updates yet.
Will try to look at the log files to see if there any clues there. Seems like a driver issue to me as well.

 

Ok, the laptop is fixed.
Turns out that the memory that I purchased from Amazon was bad. This memory passed 2 different test, including memtest+.
I took the memory out of a different laptop and the laptop ran as normal. I returned the memory and purchased some different memory to install and now the machine is up and running.

Thanks, John for your help.

 

Thank you for updating us on the cause and solution.

John