Gateway notebook non-boot issue.

Any assistance is gratefully accepted. I have a Gateway M360 series notebook- it’s about 1.5 years old, runs Windows XP, and up until now I’ve had no issues with it at all.

The other day I went to turn it on and nada- nothing. Well, the power was being received; when I pushed the power button the light around it lit and the first indicator light came on (the network light). The other indicator lights flashed for a moment, then went out and stayed out.

I repowered it off and on (a million times, probably), I tried booting to the CD ( I could hear the CD drive spinning, but it did nothing- no indicator lights), absolutely nothing worked. I tried removing the battery and using AC only, nothing. I tried removing and putting the battery back in, nothing (I’d had a similar issue with a Compaq laptop a few years ago and that would reset it when this sort of thing happened)

2 days later (I kept trying) when I got home last night I turned it on and LO AND BEHOLD! It worked!!! Powered up just like normal, works fine. Like nothing ever happened.

So my question is, geeks, do you have any idea what might have happened or how to prevent it from happening again? Do you think it’s some part that’s breaking and it will die entirely? If you have seen this before and have a theory, I’d be interested in hearing it.

This is a work computer for me and I do regular backups. I work from home so I do my own maintainence- I regularly run spyware cleaners, virus scans, and have had no issues.

The ONLY thing I’ve noticed over the past few months is occasionally when the AC power is plugged in, it will flip back and forth from battery to AC like the plug isn’t quite in the back port exactly right- it’s possible that there’s a short in that cord near the part that plugs into the machine.

The only new thing I’ve been using on it is a USB floppy drive, but that’s been for about 3 months and this just happened over the weekend.

I have the same problem with my HP laptop. The problem is that the power jack has partly broken off from its soldered contacts on the motherboard, and so it only sporadically gets power from the AC adapter.

My guess is that it did what mine does: it disconnected, and you didn’t notice that it had switched over to battery power, and it ran the battery down. Then when you tried to switch it on, the battery was dead and the power jack wasn’t getting any power, so it wouldn’t come on. Later, it probably got jostled and reconnected, and charged the battery back up. Then when you turned it back on, the power jack was connected again and/or the battery had power too.

The cure is to resolder the power jack, of course, but that may not be possible without opening the whole computer up…

Good theory (and actually exactly what was wrong with my old Compaq) but not the case here, I don’t believe. I actually tried it with an identical known working cord (my visiting friend has a Gateway laptop, too) and it did the same. The battery was charged fully, too- it was displaying that correctly. So weird.

One thing- I submitted an e-mail to Gateway tech support and they said I might need to reseat my RAM memory, which is odd. But hey, if it happens again I’ll certainly try that.

Thanks for replying! Crazy computers. It’s always something, isn’t it?

I am not a computer technician by any means, but when the same thing happened to daughter’s 3 month old Dell it was the mother board that they replaced. Then the hard drive went, but that is irrelevant to the current thread.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I tried mine with a different cord and adapter, too, and that didn’t fix it. Because it’s not the cord or adapter – it’s the jack that you plug it into, the one soldered onto the motherboard. Which makes sense, because those things get plugged into and unplugged from a lot, so the soldering connections are bound to break eventually.

Of course, that might not be what it is in your case, but it matches my symptoms. Here’s one way to find out: pull your battery out and use the computer for a few days. If the computer just turns off at random intervals, you’ll know it’s the power jack. (You could test it faster by wiggling the cord without the battery in, but mine sometimes stays “working” for hours or days at a time, even when I wiggle it, and sometimes it only works for a few seconds at a time and I have to wiggle it around to get it to reconnect … and then it disconnects a few seconds later. So it might not do it if you just wiggle the cord.)

Ouch! I hope not. Do you know, by any chance if she had any trouble with it before it went? I’m just curious. I had zero symptoms of anything wrong at all.

Ahhh, I have you now. I will do exactly that and see if that’s the issue! I appreciate your help. The only reason I didn’t think that is because my battery was fully charged (according to the indicator lights, anyway) and the machine still would not boot up, even solely on battery power, so I didn’t think it was that.

Thanks for that- I’ll give it a shot and see what happens!

Hmm. If the battery was fully charged, and it still wouldn’t come on, that sounds like it wasn’t the problem. Of course, it could be that the battery isn’t holding a charge – I first noticed MY problem because my laptop was just turning off completely every now and then, and eventually I figured out that my battery was completely dead and not holding a charge even though it said it was 100% charged, so whenever the jack on the motherboard disconnected, the laptop instantly powered off. But my battery was 2 years old at that point. Yours is a bit younger. Still, it’s been known to happen. I say give my suggestion about taking the battery out a try, and see if it shuts off sometimes – then at least you’ll know if the jack is bad.

Actually, this is a very common cause of the symptoms you describe.

Really? I’d just never heard of that. I’ve seen it happen when you’re replacing RAM, but never just out of the blue for no reason. In your experience, is it something that will likely recur or just a random fluke? Everything is working fine now, would you reseat the RAM anyway or just leave it be?

I sure appreciate the perspective. I knew that if it was something that just happens someone here would know about it.

Well, after the battery and power cord contacts, that’s where I would go next, given the symptoms. While it’s true that this would be most common when replacing/adding RAM, since it’s fairly easy to access the RAM on many or even most laptops, I’d say it is worth a shot just to rule it out in this case.

The two problems we’ve had with Gateway laptops, and I love them, are dead batteries that won’t charge and bad displays.
Should it happen again, plug in a monitor and see what happens. My experience is that the display will fail and begin working again.

I’ll do that for sure, although I don’t think it was display- the drive wasn’t showing any activity at all.

I either missed that or fell prey to my natural distrust of users who…exaggerate.
“Did you try and install anything on this computer?”
“No…not lately…not today anyway.” :slight_smile:

The only other problem I’ve had with Gateway laptops was hard drive failure, and there were plenty of error messages.