Dell Inspiron M5010 7 beep error

[Brickerberry]

Hi all,

 

I've been fiddling around with a Dell inspiron M5010 that i acquired for free because it wouldn't boot. The laptop powers on without any problems, but nothing appears on the screen and after a while it starts beeping. It beeps seven times, then pauses and beeps seven times again and continues to do so until I manually power the system off with the powerswitch. Clearing the CMOS did not fix this. After some googeling, I found out that this was a common error for this particular model, appearently the soldering between the gpu and tthe motherboard on this model is easily damaged because of the constant temperature changes of the components. It could however also be a cpu failure or a motherboard failure and i want to make sure that I base my decision on what to do next on a correct diagnosis, so these are the questions to which i would really like to find the answer:

 

1. There are multiple videos on youtube that explain how to fix the seven beep problem if it is caused by a gpu failure. These videos make me doubt if this is the right diagnosis for my system, because the laptops in the videos still light up the screen with weird jibberjabber, while my screen does absolutely nothing.  (I've tried hooking up an external monitor to exclude the lapop screen from being the problem) It seems to me that for the systems visual outputs to fail cmpletely, the soldering of the gpu would have to have vanished completely...?. Could my problem still be a GPU related problem if the laptop doesn't put out any visual signals at all?

 

2. Is there any way to determine if this is just a CPU problem? I would really like this to be the case because ordering a new CPU would only cost me 22 euros and cpu replacement is fairly easy.

Any help to make an accurate diagnosis more likely will be highly appreciated, 

 

Kind reards, Brickerberry

[Brickerberry]

This question would probably have been more appropriate in the " troubleshooting" section, I'm sorry... Could a moderator maybe change this threads location?