Gateway 600YGR laptop, won’t boot.
Pressing power button causes system fan to turn on, scroll/caps/num lock lights to blink once, hard drive to spin up, and speakers to give a little pop. Normally, the next thing would be the BIOS screen appearing for a second, then on to boot. Currently, there is no video output at all and no boot. No POST beeps. The system fan stays on, where it normally shuts off a few seconds after boot. The only action I take that has any effect is holding down the power button for 4 sec. to turn off computer.
This problem happened once before. Gateway tech support had me remove AC adapter and battery (main and the extra in a drive bay), let it sit to allow motherboard to reset (? - what sort of memory is being cleared here?) then plug in power supply w/o batteries. Turned it on, and it worked. Booted up, loaded windows, then I shut down, replaced batteries, every thing peachy, until now.
The removal-of-power trick doesn’t work. Reseating RAM sticks (2x256MB), using one, switching slots doesn’t work. Reseating HD doesn’t work. Activating hardware-reset (paper-clip through small hole on bottom) doesn’t work.
After removing power, when the power supply is reattached, the power indicator would turn on, without having touched the power switch. Pressing power button at this point results in absolutely none of the above (2nd para), but little red indicator with no label on left side of front of laptop illuminates. If instead of hitting power button when power light is on, the AC adapter is removed then replaced, then the power light is now off and hitting power button results in the same non-functioning as before.
I’ve sent the (hopefully still functioning) hard drive to my on-campus hardware repair folks in hopes of recovering some unbacked-up files (no comments on this please 
:mad: :wally ) and will send the computer back to Gateway for service as soon as the box arrives.
In the meantime, I was wondering if any dopers out there might have some insight as to 1) WTF is wrong with my computer? 2) Are there any other diagnostics you can think of? 3) Is this a ‘normal’ problem? I’d never heard of it, before I came along. 