Mostly Dead Dell 1535 Laptop 5
Last evening, I noticed that my Dell 1535 Laptop wasn’t responsive. It was recording a TV show with the Hauppauge 950Q USB QAM tuner at the time, among other things that it always does.
Below I’ll discuss symptoms, trouble shooting methods and my resolution
Symptoms at Reboot
Starting from a completely powered down state, when the power button is pressed,
- power LED displays a white light
- the media panel sequentially lights from left to right, then from right to left
- immediately following the media lights, the DVD drive spins, then stops
- power LED turns off
- there is no video or flicker
- no BIOS screen, no video at all
- no single LED flashes
- no beeps or other speaker sounds
- fan doesn’t come on
- WiFi locater doesn’t work
Initial Troubleshooting
I did enough trouble shooting last evening to determine this was a bigger problem than I’d seen previously. To power down the system, I had to press the power button, it immediately shutdown the system, hard. I tried
- rebooting
- doing a static discharge by taking out the battery, disconnecting the power and pressing the power button Keyboard problem
- inserting a Spinrite boot CD
None of these attempts made any difference. Lights, in order, off. That’s it. Tomorrow will require more detailed efforts.
Detailed Troubleshooting
First thing this morning, I tried the power button again, thinking the issue could be heat related. No joy. Yep, this was gonna take much more effort.
I don’t know much about the internals of this laptop, though I have swapped the 320GB disk drive when installing Windows7 … a few times.
I started with by googling in the hopes that the media LEDs were telling me something. They were not. Then I came across many other people having issues with the media bar, DVD eject not working, usually it was leaving an LED on or not working at all. The power button isn’t connected to the LED bar, The most useful trouble shooting threads were:
- general trouble shooting_
- media bar selective disable
- Exact problem I have with a solution, but it didn’t work for me.
So I’m left to my own means to figure this out. I start by reseating the memory, which is what the Dell Manual recommends. No Joy. This isn’t going to be easy.
I plug the system into my KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) and try to boot hoping the video issue is just the screen. No joy.
Next, I pull the memory, disk, radios, and CMOS battery then try to boot. The plan here is to add each piece of hardware back, one at a time to determine which is broken. That was quick. It doesn’t boot with all this stuff sitting on my desk. No joy.
So, now I’m left with the DVD drive (still holding a Spinrite CDR that I’d like to get back), CPU and motherboard. Very little else is left.
Each time I try to boot, the same LEDs light in the same way, the DVD spins, and power LED goes off.
I treat this laptop very nicely. It has never been dropped. It doesn’t get moved. It always runs on a flat, hard surface, so cooling isn’t an issue. It is about 16 months old. I bought it 8/27/2008, so it should have another 18+ months of usable life remaining. This laptop didn’t travel very much at all. It left the house perhaps 10 times total. Also, it was always placed into a foamy laptop sleeve.
I’m starting to realize that my laptop is dead and not coming back. I need a few more days of denial before it sinks in. Obviously, it is out of warranty, but I’ll try the Dell Support method.
My prior Dell 600M laptop died when I dropped it 2 feet to a hard surface. It was almost 4 yrs old and had been abused with travel. This Studio 1535 was babied.
Parts?
The parts that I expect to be able to reuse are
- 320GB 2.5" SATA drive. It will be USB connected to another machine shortly. I own 2 of these drives and mirror them
- 2 × 2GB DDR2 5300S memory sticks
- Keyboard – I’ve replaced Dell keyboards previously
DR Plan
So it appears that I get to test my DR plan . I’ve tested this in the last few days with server VM images. It worked. Now for the laptop DR test.
My main-daily-use computer is a VirtualBox Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. I had a Windows7 Host-hypervisor on the Dell that failed. There’s also my VirtualBox WinXP image.
I perform automatic backups of
- Windows7 machine – weekly
- Ubuntu Desktop VM HOME – nightly (that backup includes a list of all applications installed)
- WinXP VM monthly or so, but important data is backed up immediately after use. I use this VM for MS-Office and those docs end up inside a CMS on a server immediately. I didn’t have any documents checked out at the time of failure.
Nearly dead? Ok, perhaps mostly dead is better?
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So it appears that my credit card double your manufacturers warranty clause will be exercised again for this broken laptop. It appears to be a problem with the motherboard I’m curious how this replacement will happen since this model isn’t available anymore
I’m glad I just paid my annual membership fee, which I really hate paying. It has replaced a 1TB disk drive AND a lawnmower in the last 2 years due to accidents. This is a manufacturing failure, IMHO.
Just visited the Dell Support web site and entered my Service Tag only to see that the warranty had expired 2/1/2010. Talk about bad (or good) luck! The CC replacement will probably take a few weeks just to review, then I’ll get to ship the machine someplace. It will soon be time to use Darik’s Boot and Nuke on the drive to protect proprietary/personal data.
I have the exact same problem and my Dell 1535 was purchased in September 2008 and failed Feb 2010 and is out of warrenty. I was hoping it was not going to be the Motherboard as unlike you my credit card does not have the double manufacturers warrenty clause. There must have been a faulty batch of motherboards not that Dell would ever admit it.I was wondering how you disproved the CPU as being the fault, and proved it to be the M/B
Regards
Steve
Steve, Get over it. The machine is out of warranty. Does it really matter which part failed? I have a quote for a new motherboard at $560. For that price, I’d buy a new laptop.
Post the laptop on eBay for parts and be honest about the state it is currently in. Personally, I’d retain the disk drive since you can never have enough storage and that drive would make a great USB backup disk for the next laptop.
Today I checked the status of my insurance claim online. It says paid but for only the amount to fix it, not including the cost to get the estimate. I checked the CC account with the bank to see if they’d just deposited the amount there. Nope. I probably won’t fix the computer. Rather, I’ll buy a newer laptop with
I’ll be certain to contact the CC insurance about getting the $40 diagnostic fee paid too.
Time to get shopping.
So the insurance check arrived yesterday. It was just for the fix/quote and didn’t include the cost of the estimate ($40), which was promised during the initial claim procedure. I was told they would cover that cost too.
Ok, so we have a time line from report to check – 2/9 was the day it broke and I started the claim process the next day. The check arrived on 4/12. A little over 2 months.
It took 10 days for the paperwork to snail-mail to my home, so I didn’t do anything up to that point. For what the snail-mail said, I don’t really understand why I couldn’t just be told the information via a web form. Perhaps they wanted to send it through the mail so any fraud would also include mail-fraud too. That’s 2/20.
I didn’t get the laptop cost to fix it for about two weeks – most of that time was my laziness and need to backup the disk drive, remove proprietary data and put all the original parts back inside. Then I dropped it off at a local computer place on Friday afternoon-ish. The laptop wasn’t looked at and the estimate ready until the following Wednesday. They wrote a nice letter detailing the repair needs and costs. However, they did not include the estimate costs in that letter. I did send the $40 CC receipt with the claim.
Time to send the check back or perhaps I need to file another claim for the $40?