This trick got me two i7-4600U IPS FHD Touch E7440’s for $98/unit* - one sadly needs a screen (bad backlight) and neither sold with a battery, SSD+cable/caddy or RAM (although I did rummage up some 4GB DDR3L modules), so I may not be able to economically repair the bad unit :(. That said, the one with a good LCD is ready as soon as I buy a battery and a HD caddy+cable, and possibly put a matched RAM set in. I’m recycling an SSD from another machine.
*Covid market - even desperate parents didn’t want to touch that gamble for their kids for Zoom school. It's because the possibility of a bad board is very, very real.
Pull the CMOS battery for 1-2 minutes and try to boot without it. If it boots, the CMOS RAM was corrupted. If it doesn’t, confirmed bad motherboard. It’s not like this isn’t known, so I don’t mind revealing it. The issue is some Dell laptops are sensitive to CMOS corruption moreso then others. The E7440 is a 2-in-1 special: it hates booting with CMOS corruption (which isn't entirely uncommon) and it's somewhat voltage sensitive. I suspect your Vostro is in that same group.
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What happened before this problem arose? Was everything working fine?
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 mike crwdne2934271:0
Yes Mike everything was working just fine. Powered down before going to sleep, and then next morning the laptop just failed to turn on. I have noticed though that when I put the battery back on. the charging light comes on.
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 Fordi Dhliwayo crwdne2934271:0
@fordi Yeah check the battery health in ePSA. My old E6540 did something like that when the pack started to wear, but it booted with multiple attempts. My E6440 is fine so far, though - but it's NX31D battery is almost as tired and may do it soon.
F12>Diagnostics.
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 Nick crwdne2934271:0
Thank you Nick for your suggestion. However, the challenge is the laptop does not run long enough to get into bios or activate diagnostics via the Fn keys. The screen is blank, no fan spinning, nothing.
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 Fordi Dhliwayo crwdne2934271:0
@fordi
You may have seen this site already with tear down videos:
https://www.parts-people.com/blog/2016/0...
crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0 mike crwdne2934271:0
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