[rescue] Looking for tips and advice on laptop disassembly

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- "Carl R. Friend" <crfriend at rcn.com> wrote:

>     Here's what it's doing:  Immediately after
> inserting the battery,
> the power LED lights up, the internal fan spins
> momentarily, and the
> disk briefly spins up -- after that, nothing.  The
> battery seems to
> take a charge, and the battery-status LED on the
> back of the display
> changes colour to denote a full charge -- so the
> power bits seem to
> be OK.  The lack of external video, I'm afraid,
> bodes ill.

Hmm, sounds like something isn't seated right. Take
the machine farther apart. On some Dell laptops, there
is a power regulator board that plugs against the
motherboard with a couple of flat white connectors.
It's held down with a screw or two. Same kind of
arrangement is sometimes found on older machines with
processor boards (as opposed to bare chips). When a
laptop gets dropped, it twists the plastic case out of
whack, and unseats things like this. Remove the board,
dust it, and firmly reseat it. Any other kind of
module should be reseated firmly as well.

-Ian