Dell XPS M1530 not working. Any ideas?

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Takuan

42 posts

Geek

#75673 21-Jan-2011 10:06

Hi all

I have an almost 3 year old laptop, a Dell XPS M1530. It runs on an Intel Core2 Duo T9300 processor, has 3Gb of SDRAM, a 320Gb HDD and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT dedicated video card. Oh, and Windows Vista Home Premuim.

Unfortunately it has stopped working! When I press the power button, it lights up briefly, something seems to be spinning up but then the power button lights goes off and nothing further happens. There is a faint humming in the machine, so something is still active: only by keeping the power button pressed, does it fully shut down after a while…

Here’s what I have done so far:

- Removed HDD and checked it with an external HDD encasing: it still works (pfew, all my data is safe)

- Taken out memory modules one by one, swapped them around, started the computer with one module only. Made no difference (just in case one of the modules or one of the slots is fried.

Does anyone have an idea what it could be, and how it could be fixed? Any advice on good repair shops in the Auckland area would also be appreciated, as the laptop is otherwise still fairly current (I think) and I’d like to maintain it for a little while longer… Unless the repair costs are too high.

Many thanks!

killerteddy

50 posts

Geek

#429495 21-Jan-2011 12:03

Try connecting to an external monitor, see if you can get display that way.

I have the same laptop and the only possible reason I can think of is the Nvidia GPU. If you google around, this GPU has given a lot of people problems around the world.

Still have current or recently expired warranty? I've heard since Nvidia acknowledges the problem, they've added one more year of extra warranty for GPU on top of standard warranty.

Takuan

42 posts

Geek

#429517 21-Jan-2011 13:04

Thanks for that... It certainly shows that the video card could be the culprit... As the laptop is nearly 3 years old, I wonder if I still have warranty, but it's worth the call to Dell. Getting it fixed it probably going to be fairly complicated (=expensive). Unfortunately, because it is otherwise a very nice machine...