Dead laptop
 

Hello boys and girls, I've a friends laptop that is completly kubbugerd.

Wont turn on at all, makes absolutly no indication of turning on, then dying, screen doesnt flash, nothing. However, when we plugged in the mains power, you can hear a very faint ticking sound. Apparently it doesnt look like its a CD Drive, because its coming from the other side, it's possible its the CPU, but I've no idea why a cpu would tick, and I say its a cpu just because I can see quite a large brass thermal plate. Its possibly a hard drive, but juding on my knowledge of pc's, it looks nothing like a hard drive.

Any help would be awsome. Thanks all.

Might be the internal power supply is bad.

do you get anything if you use a live cd like knoppix?

Not trying to insult you or your intelligence or anything like that, but remember that a laptop hard drive is tiny comapared to a regular PC one.

A ticking hard drive is a knackered hard drive..
the thermal plate "could" be a heatsink..
it might not be booting cos of a hard drive error (possble but unlikely as you normally do get a post screen)
the mainboard might be gone and thats another (expensive) possibilty. or the screen could be gone,, does it have an external monitor port? that you could plug a regular monitor into,, (this would at least rule out the sceen)

What make and model is it,, and we can see if we can find anything out about it IE location of HDD etc

I'll grab the model number off him tomorow, but its a *tiny*, if that narrows anything down.

I'm not a latop man, so have no idea what laptop hard drives look like, so dont worry about insulting me in that respect. (:

Will try the moniter too, although i doubt its that, he described the thing just *froze*, then he rebooted, *and nothing*.

I cant use knoppix, because it wont post. :D

Is there anyway to check the *internal power supply* in order to rule that out?

You could try removing the battery entirely and powering only off the mains - I have had some success doing that. But if the hard drive is 'ticking' it's on it's way out. If you are lucky, it's still under warranty......otherwise your friend will have to buy a new hard drive.

If it fails SMART, will it post?