I wrote about a broken Dell laptop last month and have narrowed down
the symtoms a bit more. Strange that it will boot when you do not turn
it on for a few days.

Dell laptop; battery, cd drive, hard drive have all been removed.
System simply turns on the green light, hums for 1 second then green light
(i.e. power) goes off and it recylces the process. If I leave it plugged in
this cycling will just continue. The screen is just blank.

However if I don't touch the PC for several days and let it discharge?, the
system will boot off a floppy, function for a few minutes then it will lock
up. When you then try to boot it goes back to the cycling issue discribed
above. Nothing.

Does this sound like the motherboard is dead? What would cause it to boot
once or twice when the system has not been used for several days?

Al Franz wrote:

Hi,

The symptoms you describe (leave computer off for awhile, then boots,
but then doesn't boot) sounds like it might be heat-related, i.e., one
or more components and/or something else (e.g., a solder joint) is
failing when the system warms up. I don't know if you can do this with
your 5000e, but take a look at:

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article...,113441,00.asp

You might want to see if you can determine if yours has one of those 750
MHz CPUs?