Dell Inspiron 3700
433GT? (about a 433Mhz)
Purchased in 2000
Brand new battery & AC adapter/cord
New motherboard (well, supposedly unused off ebay...)
Girlfriend's laptop. She was having some problems with it not
recognizing the battery. Quite often she'd push the power button
without the power cord plugged in & it would not start up at all. The
power button LED would flash green for about 1/2sec and then the
battery LED would show amber/red for just a tick & that's it. No
sound, no attempt by the harddrive to spin up, no monitor flicker. If
she then plugged it in, it worked fine.
I figured the battery was due for replacement. So we bought a new
battery & AC adapter/cord. Same problem. Now I was puzzled. I was
able to get a compatible motherboard & installed that. (CPU & all
removable parts kept from her old setup. Just replaced the
motherboard itself.) In this process, I noticed that a couple screws
were missing from the bottom of the case (tried 3 computer shops &
couldn't find anywhere that had these metric screws available). After
putting the new MB in & making sure all the remaining screws were
tight (I swapped a couple to different holes to replace ones that were
missing before, thinking maybe their absence caused a grounding/short
problem), everything worked perfectly w/out plugging it in. Success!
But not so fast. After a couple weeks, the problem cropped back up.
In all of this, I've checked the battery manually via a charge-check
button & LEDs on the batteries themselves. Battery shows fine charge.
So, does anybody have suggestions before I punt this darn thing?
Could the CPU have some issue w/it to make it not recognize the
battery? Can't imagine so. The only things that weren't replaced
were the HD, CD-ROM, monitor, case, & CPU. I don't imagine formatting
the HD would help at all as when the problem occurs we don't even get
to the HD spin up process. Don't even get to the POST process until
we plug in power cord. Any constructive suggestions would be
appreciated. Thanks.
