I’ve got a Dell Inspiron laptop running WindowsXP. Up until two nights ago, it’s been working perfectly fine. It rarely gets moved from our dining room table.
Now, when I try to power it up with the battery in, it powers up & just displays a blank screen.
If I take the battery out, it gets as far as showing the Windows loading screen for a usual time, but goes to a blank screen when the usual Windows logon screen should appear.
I’m completely at a loss as to what could be wrong. Of course, the warranty ran out about two months ago. Any ideas?
The usual suspect for laptop booting problems is overheating, which is often caused by dust build up a year plus into a laptop’s life.
If you feel comfortable taking it apart, open it up and get to the cpu and clear out any dust you find. Most laptops collect dust like crazy within their fans and heatsinks. You’ll be shocked at how much you find in there… enough to build a mini-me out of dust balls.
I’ve been able to bring 4 friends’ laptops back from what seemed like the dead simply by cleaning the dust out from them and I recommend anyone who has a laptop to clear out the dust every 6 months or so.
If that doesn’t work… try running memtestx86 and see if you have a memory problem.
The usual suspect for laptop booting problems is overheating, which is often caused by dust build up a year plus into a laptop’s life.
Which, coincidentally, is round about the lifetime of this laptop…
A can of compressed air blasted into the air vents on a laptop can do absolute wonders.
That said, I helped a friend a couple years back by dismantling his machine as CCZ described above; blasted air into the heatsink duct, and a wad of dust the size of my thumb popped outta there (which was about 2x the size of the space it had been packed into).
This sounds familiar. The first time I started getting overheating with my laptop (that also spends its life on a table in the same position) I lifted it up and darn-near burned my hand on the table - I was shocked how hot it was! Combine the heat generated with the inability of the wood to diffuse it, plus the complete lack of air circulating underneath a laptop, and it’s no wonder they die of overheating problems! We had to replace a motherboard, video card and hard drive on two seperate laptops because of this. Now we put them on little rubber grommits to try and get a bit more air underneath them.
