Dell Vostro 1500 Won't Boot

[Eluros]

Greetings,

I've been allowing my wife to use my laptop-- a Dell Vostro 1500-- and now it won't boot. She maintains that nothing unusual happened; she was playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (yes, I have an awesome wife) right before shutting it down, and the game performed fine.

Here's a link to the laptop on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Dell-Vostro-15.../dp/B00150IYRU

This sounds like the problems caused by the messed up GPUs on many Dell laptops, which I found info about here:
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-b...ment-to-all-affected-customers-worldwide.aspx

The Vostro 1400, and the Vostro 1510 are covered, but not the 1500 (argh!).

I have tried reseating the RAM, to no avail. When I press the "Power" button, the Power light comes on, but nothing loads on the screen and it doesn't sound like all of the internal hardware is running.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'm not overly concerned about recovering the data, but I would really like to get the laptop back up and running.

Thanks!

 

[dfuze]

does that mean that the fans don't spin up when you press the power button?

Are you only running off the battery or w/ AC plugged in?

 

[Eluros]

does that mean that the fans don't spin up when you press the power button?

Are you only running off the battery or w/ AC plugged in?

It sounds like something is spinning up-- perhaps the hard drive-- but not everything. Maybe 1/5 of the noise that it usually makes.

I've tried both battery and AC. One thing I read on another site to try was to remove the battery and AC, and plug in the AC while holding the power button down. That did not work, either.

 

[dfuze]

I'm leaning more towards it being the nVidia card, sounds like even if it wasn't one of the ones covered that it may be the same fail issue. Even though it wasn't part of the recall (according to your link) I would try calling them and escalating the issue to a manager and calmly but pressing tell them how similar it is to the other ones in the recall and how they should replace it for you. My wife used to do customer service for cable and I learned that when you are nice to the agents on the phone, they will often go the extra mile to help you out (it may take getting a manager though for this issue).