Laptop wont boot up?

Aria · Jul 9, 2014

year old Dell Inspiron 3521 if i'm not mistaken. i'll first off state i'm terrible with technology so if you could dumb things down for me that'd be great. still under warranty, but I'd rather see if it was fixable before sending it to dell.

Basically, I turn the power on, it boots up with the fans making normal noise and after 2 seconds the screen is gray/faded black colour and doesn't load up the dell logo or anything like that. the computer also sounds like it's in sleep mode. If i hit the power button while it's on it goes off instantly, like when you hold it down to turn it off.

So far, i've tried the laptop without the battery and just the AC, and vise versa to the same result.

any help? cheers!

Snowbear · Jul 9, 2014

I'd venture to say it could be a problem with your BioS. In that case, find someone experienced with computer hardware (ask friends, take it to a shop) or if it's failing to boot from the HD you can try to put a USB of an OS (probably linux) and attempt to boot and then clean install from that.

Otherwise you simply need to replace the hardware, probably the motherboard (which i'd also not attempt to do yourself, contact someone that knows what they're doing).

szskateman22 · Jul 9, 2014

Personally, I would say that if it's under a warranty through Dell I would go for the warranty. It actually sounds like a burnt graphics card, but that's my opinion. Call the warranty office and ask if they can recover everything from your hard drive and put it onto a different computer for you or save all your files in general.

The reason I say this is because as soon as it starts causing issues and you start playing with other things inside the computer you are inherently voiding a warranty which is there to save you from the cost of parts.

Snowbear · Jul 9, 2014

szskateman22 said:
The reason I say this is because as soon as it starts causing issues and you start playing with other things inside the computer you are inherently voiding a warranty which is there to save you from the cost of parts.

Yes, this is what I was trying to say just much, much better worded.

Find someone that knows what they're doing/go through warranty, don't attempt anything yourself!

Luis0228 · Jul 9, 2014

It can be lots of things.
It can be that your screen isn't working.
Your graphics card over-heated.
Your operating system went corrupt.
Motherboard has problems.
It's hard to tell what it is unless someone physically sees it.
If you're under warranty, you should just send it to the factory so it can be their problem.