Took apart my laptop, now I can't turn it on.

August 9, 2009 8:39 PM

I recently disassembled my father's laptop to clean the heat sink. After reassembly, I'm now having trouble turning it on.

My father's laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, that's about 3 years old. It's a small laptop so the heat sink is layered underneath everything else, meaning I had to pull apart everything before I could do some cleaning. I followed the instructions on this website: http://ahwee.com/how-to-disassemble-laptop-dell-latitude-d620
As far as my hardware experience goes, I've installed RAM before and cleaned out the heat sink to my laptop. This was my most complicated task.

After I reassembled the laptop, I was able to turn it on just fine. A while later I closed the laptop thinking it would go into standby mode, but when I returned and opened the top it wasn't able to resume. I tried pressing the power button a few times but then I just decided to turn it off. I pulled the plug and removed the battery, and then put both back in. Still no success. I can see the green light on the adapter but that's about it. I know the battery is fully charged because my father always uses the adapter.

I'm wondering if I screwed up somewhere in the assembly/disassembly process, but it's strange I was able to turn it on just fine on the first attempt.

Thanks for your help.

posted by AngryTypingGuy to computers & internet (7 comments total)

EDIT: One more thing I've tried without any luck: removing the battery and turning it on with the adapter plugged in.
posted by AngryTypingGuy at 8:45 PM on August 9

Look for a bios battery to remove. Unplug all power, including BIOS battery, for a few hours, and try again.

The following might just be a red hearing, but...
Getting the keyboard installed correctly is really important. When I had a failing keyboard I went in crazy circles trying to isolate why it would turn on one time and not another, in the end a properly installed functioning keyboard was all it took.
posted by Chuckles at 8:57 PM on August 9

Did you separate the chip from the heat-sink? Did you re-apply the heat-sink thermal paste? It's something that has to be done in order to prevent the laptop from shutting itself down to prevent overheating the chip.
posted by 517 at 9:08 PM on August 9

Have you tried reseating the RAM chips?
posted by gfrobe at 12:51 AM on August 10

Does the same thing happen if you remove the battery, and plug in the power? What about just the battery?
posted by enfa at 9:57 AM on August 10

Most likely cause is you didn't get the case together quite right and now the power button, a key, or the lid sensor is getting pressed on all the time. Disassemble the case and see if it works without the case on it.
posted by chairface at 1:42 PM on August 10

Turns out the cable from the palm rest wasn’t properly folded underneath itself. Without noticing I jammed the palm rest so that it wasn’t lying flat on top of the bottom portion of the laptop. There wasn’t much of a gap but I guess it was enough to prevent the keys from working properly.

Thanks for everyone's help!
posted by AngryTypingGuy at 9:46 PM on August 10