Computer Problems

Back in June, my Dell Inspiron E1405 stopped working. Just plain wouldn't turn on. No whirring of the fan, no starting of the harddrive, no sound at all when the power button was pushed. As some of you may remember, I am absolutely in love with that laptop. I loved the media buttons and speaker on the front edge, I loved the gray and white combination that so many other people hate, and I loved the photo sticker I put on the cover.

So, of course, we spent a good deal of time taking it apart and trying to figure out what was wrong. We tried so many things, including trying with and without battery and A/C power, pushing the button below the button you see on the laptop, taking RAM out and putting it back in, using a multimeter to test if power was being sent, etc. It was fun to take the thing apart, so I had to share some pictures. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from when it was completely apart. All pictures were taken with the camera on my phone, but I think they came out rather well anyway.







In the end, we were not able to fix it. It appears that the motherboard is dead. How annoying! Luckily, my officemate has a harddrive dock that lets you plug it in to another computer via USB. So at least I had all of my files at my fingertips, which is the more important thing.



I searched for awhile for another laptop of the same model that I could just stick my harddrive in and call it a day. The cheapest I could find was $600, but for all I knew that motherboard would die in the next year as well! So that entire search was quite frustrating. I tried to get people to sell the laptop to me without most of the pieces (like no memory, harddrive, optical drive) since I already had those and they worked, but no one was interested.