A friend of mine who has very little money was given this Dell Latitude C640 by someone who didnt want it any more - "Can't get it to work, if you can fix it you can have it" - one of those deals. Since I know a little bit, she asked me if I could help, and I sure would like to.
So I plug it in and go to start it, but when you plug in the adapter, the green lights on the side go on for maybe one second and then they are gone. I have played with manipulating the plug in the socket, and it does seem to be able to "make contact" depending on how I wiggle it around, but only on maybe 8 or 9 occasions have I got it to stay "on" long enough to get the boot process going. Twice I have seen the Windows XP boot screen come up, and then go quickly to the text that tells me something about the configuration being bad, and I should go into Setup. The other times it went straight to the error message without the Windows screen. Twice I got it to go to the Setup. There is something in the error message about the system time needing to be set.
But all of what I have seen is there and gone so fast, I am more concentrating on holding on to the live process by trying to keep the plug at just the right magic angle in the socket, that I have not been able to pay enough attention to what I see on the screen. I know enough about getting into Setup, that I can do things there, I just cant get it to last long enough.
I tried it with an adapter cord from another Dell, a Latitude 620 that had the same adapter, and that one did the same thing. So I figure it is in the power input socket itself, or maybe just maybe, the system time really is missing and that is the cause of the short time I get to do anything.
And one more curious thing. Usually if something is kinda shaky so that wiggling a plug around in a socket makes intermittent "connections", you could leave it in and play around with wiggling this way and that, and get it connected and lose it, and get it again and lose it again. But in this one, if I get it to go on and then lose it, I always have to pull it out and stick it back in again. Most of the times that I stick it in, no luck, and I pull it out and stick it back in again. But IF IT DOES CONNECT, so the lights go green even if briefly, then when it loses the connection, that's it. It wont work at all again unless it has been pulled out and stuck back in.
Any clues?
So I plug it in and go to start it, but when you plug in the adapter, the green lights on the side go on for maybe one second and then they are gone. I have played with manipulating the plug in the socket, and it does seem to be able to "make contact" depending on how I wiggle it around, but only on maybe 8 or 9 occasions have I got it to stay "on" long enough to get the boot process going. Twice I have seen the Windows XP boot screen come up, and then go quickly to the text that tells me something about the configuration being bad, and I should go into Setup. The other times it went straight to the error message without the Windows screen. Twice I got it to go to the Setup. There is something in the error message about the system time needing to be set.
But all of what I have seen is there and gone so fast, I am more concentrating on holding on to the live process by trying to keep the plug at just the right magic angle in the socket, that I have not been able to pay enough attention to what I see on the screen. I know enough about getting into Setup, that I can do things there, I just cant get it to last long enough.
I tried it with an adapter cord from another Dell, a Latitude 620 that had the same adapter, and that one did the same thing. So I figure it is in the power input socket itself, or maybe just maybe, the system time really is missing and that is the cause of the short time I get to do anything.
And one more curious thing. Usually if something is kinda shaky so that wiggling a plug around in a socket makes intermittent "connections", you could leave it in and play around with wiggling this way and that, and get it connected and lose it, and get it again and lose it again. But in this one, if I get it to go on and then lose it, I always have to pull it out and stick it back in again. Most of the times that I stick it in, no luck, and I pull it out and stick it back in again. But IF IT DOES CONNECT, so the lights go green even if briefly, then when it loses the connection, that's it. It wont work at all again unless it has been pulled out and stuck back in.
Any clues?
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