Dell With Cylinder Light, Alock Light, then dies?

I have acquired a friends laptop Dell Inspiron 2200. Upon hitting the power button, It will light the cylinder, which stays lit, It lights ALock, which flasshes, cycles for about ten seconds and then powers down. The screen never tries to do anything. I connected it to my VGA and still nothing.

I searched and found a few references to booting without the battery installed. No change.

Where else should I look?

I was told that the laptop had a heat related failure at one point, but that they installed and ran a fan control and the laptop would function normally after that point. Could it be an issue with the fan causing the power down?

I'm not sure if he is interested in spending the money on a new board, or if at all.

Thanks for the help.

 

Warning! I'm by far more of a "I need help" poster than a "let me help!" poster.....but having said that:

I'm fighting the same thing with my Inspiron 1520. Somebody here said to check the BIOS battery. I did, and it tested bad. So, maybe check that?

I can't tell you if it worked, because I haven't been able to simply change said battery. I had to order a new BIOS battery assembly because the Delltards created some method of attaching the leads directly to the battery. Sigh. So their "happy" customers get to pay $20 plus shipping for a $3 battery.

 

The cylinder light is the HD activity light. The Alock is the Capslock light. So it looks like it is starting POST and then stopping. It could be a heat issue but from the little I know about hardware it would have to be a CPU cooling problem to shutdown that fast. A CPU cooling issue might not even let it get that far into POST.

Indyattic, is your laptop doing the exact same thing or something slightly different? I'm just curious and will be reading this thread to learn something.

 

Well, I removed the user provided hardware as spec'd by dell. That got it down to alphalock still flashing 9 times. The POST lights dell provided don't cover this. Also, the description the gave said to boot wih the fn key to get it to beep a failure code. It never did this.

I need to test the battery.

 

I don't want to hijack this thread. Mine is here:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=197342

There are several suggestions in that thread. I haven't tried anything yet except ordering the battery. I received it, but have been too lazy to get around to installing it.

I have 2 Dell laptops, both with issues. Neither of them are used a lot and both of them rarely travel. It's really sad that they're both in such dire straits.

 

Sorry if I bring up an old thread. Do the fans come on when you power it up?