This notebook's owner is my sister. She said to me that she found some ants walking through/on it a few times and she took them out of the way by using a small piece of clean cloth. The last time that happened it gave her trouble to turn it on. After that instance it never turned on again.

After some days she took it to CompUSA for a diagnostic but they told her it was damaged beyond repair; the Power Supply never got back from the place...

I took it home to check it further and am forced to use another hp notebook's Power Supply which doesn't give as much power out as the original one. After cleaning/inspecting the outside and some inner parts that can be seen when removing the batt., the RAM module & HDD I was satisfied as to the clean status and plugged the unit for charging the batt. for ~30 mins & pressed the power button. The blue leds that I guess are supposed to lit go on but for a couple of seconds only. It has been proved that it doesn't matter how long I leave the batt. to take a charge it won't help.

Since you already know what I've done & what the unit has gone through I would like to know if resitting the CPU might help? Should I try to disassemble the unit completely for cleaning & inspection?

I used to be a computer electronic technician at DEC, so I know much about what I pretend to do.

What are your thoughts and tips as to how to proceed from here?, thanks!

I used to work at a very large company that produced laptops. I did line testing. You have no easy way to diag this since you don't have access to any documentation. A scope or vom might lead you to power in some areas. Knowing from web reports might lead you to common parts. Each laptop is unique. There is no standard. Some Dells might have known on off switch issues or dc to dc issues.

At this point taking it apart is unknown. We don't know that Compusa did. You do need the correct PSU. Some of them are actually smart psu's and not interchangeable. I guess it can't hurt to carefully peek. Some ants could present an issue. Usually only fire ants and not regular sugar ants. If they built a nest maybe.

Best to see if anyone sells cheap parts before you get too far along. HP wanted like $300 for a laptop motherboard and a complete new system wasn't that much more.

If our Alphas ever go out I'll contact you, we got rid of our Q-bus systems.

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Thanks for replying, jefro!

I think I'm going to try during the week to open it fully to see what I can discover/clean/resit. Then, I'm going to give it another chance. Also, I can check with some friends to see if any one has a good & appropriate PSU.

I've had a trouble lifting the metal structure over the main board, I guess it's attached at the other side (actually the top side) from under the keyboard's underside.

How to detach the keyboard on this model? Is it really the keyboard that must be removed or it's enough with some plastic strips around it?

Thanks in advance for any help!

PS. I already discovered that the ants did really a mess in there; until now I've cleaned almost all surfaces suspecting a lot of interference/overload was happening there.