Saving old Laptops

[spicyinjunjoe]

Had a lot of success saving old laptops through simple improvements like substituting an SSD for a Spinning Drive and upgrading RAM. However some problems seem intractable especially when it comes to finding Windows 10 Drivers for old Graphics Cards from AMD and NVIDIA in Laptops that started out with Windows 7 or Windows 8 pre-installed! Latest AMD drivers can cause older cards to BSOD or crash everything! Do my old Dell Inspiron ELL and SONY have given me severe problems.

 

So my old Dell Inspiron crashed completely and now will not even Power on. Any way to get the Power button working again? Is it a Hardware issue. The Laptop went dead when I plugged in the Power while it was booting up.

 

Appreciate suggestions. Battery and Power Unit are both ok.

 

 

 

 

 

[TheGlenlivet]

Wont even power on?  Does holding the button down do anything?  Windows shouldn't be causing the button to not work, that sounds like a hardware issue to me.

 

Maybe pull the CMOS battery and see if that clears things?

 

[Robchil]

shorted the pcb? power control board. or shorted PSU? 

most drivers for old laptops comes in with update services. don't even try to install amd software. 

for the powerswitch.. check if it's a tiny hole you could push a paperclip into.. (reset) and have a closer look at the microswitch for the power on, on the mainboard, i've had those simply fall off. 

 

[Kilrah]

If it doesn't power up then yeah it would be hardware.