My computer won't start!

Factual Questions
1

Is it a lost hope to salvage this thing? I’ve sent it in to the manufacturer twice, about six months ago, for almost the same damned issue.

It’s an HP Pavilion G6061EA and I am about ready to tear my hair out. This is what happens, exactly:

When off, two LEDs are lit – the AC light and the battery light. So I know I’m getting adequate power.

I hit the “on” button. It lights up, along with the hard drive light and the other, smaller “on” light. The touchpad LED lights up briefly. I can’t hear anything engage, not the DVD drive, not the hard drive, not the fan, nothing. About half a second later everything shuts off, and the two power lights are the only things left.

I was able to boot into Windows once after this newest delight started. Explorer crashed almost immediately. Everything froze. Since then, it keeps shutting itself off immediately after I turn it on.

I have tried:

[ul]
[li]Resetting the flea power[/li][li]Reseating the memory and hard drive[/li][li]Pressing pretty much every function key in different boot attempts[/li][li]Using just AC power[/li][li]Cursing mightily[/li][/ul]

And still it just quickly shuts itself off after I press the on button.

Argh, argh, hell and damnation.

Is this thing a brick? It’s out of warranty, HP are probably going to charge me a mint. I have the sinking suspicion it’s the motherboard AGAIN. They replaced that and the memory last time.

Anyway…I suppose the moral of the story is not to buy HP. I’m sticking with Toshiba if I have to jettison this thing.

2

This is Norniew’s husband, Ray, and I had a similar problem with my Dell. In my case it turned out to be the battery. When I removed the battery it booted fine using the AC, so I replaced the battery and the problem never reappeared.

3

I wish it was that, but it doesn’t boot from AC power alone.

4

At a guess, I would say your motherboard’s shot. For a laptop, yeah, that basically means it’s a brick. If it’s out of warranty, salvage the hard drive and get a new one. Not HP.

5

DEFINITELY not HP. I’m really not happy about this – it’s only a year and a half old!

6

actually, go online and find teh tech manual for it, use it to go into the back and pop out this little watch battery that powers the bios or some nonsense like that, leave it out for about 5 minutes, pop it back in and give it a whirl.

Back last early spring mine gave me an error message that I couldnt gimp over to the desk fast enough to read and turned into a paperweight. A month or so ago a friend suggested I do that, and it worked.

If nothing else it wont hurt anything.

7

Huh, can’t hurt, I’ll do a hunt for the manual, ta!

8

Okay, I tried that. It is still doing the same thing. This is discouraging.

9

=( sorry it didnt work … does the tech manual have a trouble shooting section? Or how about hitting one of the tech forums for the specific model of computer?

10

It appears to be a hardware problem, most likely a dead motherboard or CPU.

Try this:

Disconnect and emove HDD.
Disconnect and remove all RAM sticks.
Power on the computer.
If it gives you a series of beeps, then the motherboard is OK and it might be the RAM that’s causing the problem.
If you hear no beeps, then the motherboard/CPU is most probably dead.

If you hear beeps, try booting with one stick, then the other (if you have multiple sticks of RAM)

Another thing to try is leave the laptop unplugged for about 30mins without the battery, then connect to power and boot. If no go, then try the same thing with battery unplugged overnight.

11

What a great idea! I’ll try it in a couple of hours and get back to you about it (I personally get a little piqued when I give people advice and they never report back, so I will be sure to do so).

I’ve already tried leaving my laptop unplugged. I also left it without a battery and unplugged overnight to see what happened. No dice. Hopefully it’s the memory…but since it was the motherboard last time it happened I’m not holding out hope – HP sells dodgy motherboards, be aware!

12

As an owner of the dreaded NC6120 (or “Bendy” as I like to call it) I can concur that HP sells shoddy motherboards.

13

Okay, I took out the HDD and the memory and tried to start the computer. It did the same exact thing again.

Does anyone know about how much replacing the motherboard is going to cost me?

14

They’re the most expensive part of a laptop to replace, generally it’s not really worth it. Depending on the exact motherboard you need it can be anything from $100-300, and there’s no way to know for certain that that is your problem, so you could be just throwing money away on a useless bit of kit. If you send it in for repair, they’ll probably tell you it’s more economical to buy a new laptop.