Be Excellent To Each Other

BUGGER.

My laptop (a dell studio 15) won't switch on. Absolutely nothing happens when I press the power button (on a charged battery, and on mains).

My feeling is that it's the power button that's broken - it's on the outside of the hinge, so there will be a bit of movement and twisting when the lid is opened and shut, maybe a wire has come loose, a poor bit of soldering or something. It's still under warranty as I only got it back in June so I'm hoping it will be an easy fix.

However, I haven't backed it up in a couple of weeks so would quite like to back up newer files on there before sending it away. Short of taking out the HDD and using it in my desktop.... are there any ways of turning the computer with external devices/network that I can try? Then I can power it on and quickly dump to my external HDD. Long shot, but worth asking I suppose.

I'm a bit reluctant to take too much of the machine apart, as like I say it is still under warranty.

Try this if it has Wake On Lan (assuming you have another PC to run it on) :
#wol">http://gammadyne.com/cmdline.htm#wol

Also, try taking the battery out and turning it on (leave it plugged in, obv).

Excellent, will give that a try. I've got other machines I can use. Ta very much



Already tried that one, nothing happened.

Try holding the button down hard while opening/closing the lid.

To be honest that sort of thing rarely goes completely wrong that suddenly, it would have gone flaky first. Worth a try though.

If it makes you feel any better, Dell's customer service is excellent when it comes to warranty repairs, or at least it was in my experience with my Alienware laptop (I only had the standard 12-month warranty though). They actually sent an engineer out to my home rather than having me send the laptop anywhere and he simply took the thing apart and replaced the faulty parts in front of me. The hard drive wasn't touched, so I didn't have to worry about not having backed up.

Heh I had this problem last thursday, I went the easy solution and bought a new one. Mind you my laptop screen also didnt work and had 3 large cracks throughout the body, and a broken hinge. Oh it was missing 3 or 4 keys aswell mainly the enter button.

Will have to try again with wake on lan, but I'm not confident as no light came on with the laptop socket when I plugged in the network cable. Also I had to take the panel off the bottom to find the MAC address. While I was doing that, though, I found the HDD was incredibly easy to remove, so I'll just bung it into my desktop and backup. And maybe (hopefully) then send to dell.



I tried a variety of button presses with the lid and angles, moving and with a gentle bit of pressure around the hinge, still nothing. Annoyingly, there was a little warning now i think back - but not much and not common.

Can I plug a SATA hard drive in while windows is already running?

This may be a daft question, it seems a bit risky to me.

Edit: searching seems to suggest 'yeah, probably'. I'm still not quite sure.

Yes, usually. Some controllers don't let you though and you might have to do a hardware scan. Plug power in first

Thanks, Davpaz

In the end, I changed the boot order in the bios instead. I'll back up the hard drive and look into sending the laptop off. I might have to send it back to the UK, but I'm hoping that if i can actually talk to someone on the phone tomorrow I can avoid that.

Dell were happy to courier out an empty box for me to return the laptop to a repair shop in this country. It's been there and come back after having the motherboard replaced, apparently.

However the file system is fucked, when I first switched it on, scan/chkdisk or whatever it is called would run for ages (before windows even booted) and then crash...

After a number of retries windows did boot, before then trying to repair itself and then booting up with all the programmes and files missing. More rebooting and repairing and the files now show up, but I have to go through UAC to access anything, and there are quite a few other odd behaviours, including an error message in chinese when I try and open word .

Create a new user and everything seems better for that user, but still a bit sluggish.

Sending it back will just take more time and aggro, and they'll just wipe it and re-image so I may as well do it myself I suppose

Yep, it will be far quicker to copy off what you need then flatten and rebuild it.
Did you get disks with it?

Only a driver DVD, but there was a recovery partition, so it wasn't too hard to re-image, although it was back to shipping condition so there was a bit of Dell crap to remove. And lots of things to reinstall, but Ninite makes getting started significantly easier.

This time I'll get an image just after I get all the useful things installed, and before too much crap builds up. I have spent the best part of the evening dicking about with this computer though.