compaq presario 900z question

[kb2crk]

this laptop was working fine. now it wont turn on.
it was shut down properly about a week and half ago and will not turn back on.
it has done this twice before and both times we just pulled the battery and charger cord for a few minutes and the it would power back up just fine.
i dont have a clue about laptops leaving me a little lost with this thing.
any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

thanks
paul

[WØTKX]

Ummm, is the power supply putting out? If you can get the correct voltage, will is supply enough current under load? I've seen that happen, but you'd have to cut one of the DC power wires coming out of the supply read the current of course. And it will be a lot if something is shorted.

The battery may have opened or shorted, or at least the convectors. Can you measure any voltage out of the battery?

It would be fast and easy if you could borrow another power supply and battery to play the swapping game. If it's neither battery or power supply, then something popped in the laptop, maybe something simple like the power switch itself or the DC power jack is shot. That happens a lot... the jack gets wiggled and moved around, and the connections break on the inside.

Good luck in your quest!

[kb2crk]

the battery is new. the power supply checks out good. i am hoping it is a switch.

[ad4mg]

the battery is new. the power supply checks out good. i am hoping it is a switch.
The on/off switch is a primary suspect. I've replaced several laptop power switches in the last few months, mainly in Acer laptops. Most are mounted on their own little circuit board, which also hosts the LED's that indicate power, HDD activity, etc.

I've found that a site called notebook solutions has a really good stock on parts such as these: http://www.notebooksolutions.ca/zc/

I've had excellent luck dealing with these guys!

[kb2crk]

well it is back up and running. it was left alone since the last time i posted. i tried to turn it on and it did nothing. i then took the battery out and unplugged the power supply. put the battery back in and it started right up. i am using it right now. i cant explain it but i do know that it will be staying on as the only time there is an issue is after it is shut off. the only reason i tried it today is my wife took my laptop to work and i hate sitting at the desktop...lol.

[W3WN]

I do NOT know if this is the case here, but I've seen similar complaints about laptop behaviour over the years, both at this job and at previous ones.

Much of the time (& again, I'm not saying that this is the case here), the root cause was the laptop going into suspense (sleep) mode instead of shutdown, and for any of a multitude of reasons, not "reawakening" correctly.

Pulling the battery & AC Power kills the suspended session loaded in volatile memory.

The laptop then reboots normally, although in some cases, it might go through some disk diagnostics to clean up open files.

[kb2crk]

I do NOT know if this is the case here, but I've seen similar complaints about laptop behaviour over the years, both at this job and at previous ones.

Much of the time (& again, I'm not saying that this is the case here), the root cause was the laptop going into suspense (sleep) mode instead of shutdown, and for any of a multitude of reasons, not "reawakening" correctly.

Pulling the battery & AC Power kills the suspended session loaded in volatile memory.

The laptop then reboots normally, although in some cases, it might go through some disk diagnostics to clean up open files.

the funny thing is that i tied all of this before to no avail. why it worked today i am not sure. my sister in law had the sleep mode problem with her laptop and a computer shop told her the motherboard was bad after charging a 100 dollar diagnostic fee. a friend of hers tried the battery trick and found that it was in sleep mode. this has happened several times with this laptop and the battery power trick always worked. the first few times i tried it earlier in the month it would not. for now we will just keep it on. it is busy updating antivirus and antispyware now. the dvd drive still wont work as it says the driver is corrupt but windows says it is fine. maybe a windows update will fix that. one can always hope.