Dell complaints

[huroncomputers]

Hi, I am working on an old Dell Inspiron 7000. If you leave it sit for a day or so, it will sometimes boot up. Then it seems to start having heat related problems. it will start to turn in and then shuts off without completing boot up and then cycles over and over again. It does it with either the battery or the AC adapter. Any thoughts?

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

I'm sure you've looked at the obvious thermal issues. Cooling a 7000 (0.4-1.0 GHz) wasn't that hard, but 6 years' worth of dust buildup could glom it up.

To get it to shutoff on overtemp before it has time to boot, you'd just about have to take the heatsink off altogether. Even then, it wouldn't just restart itself. It would go 'off' and you'd have to turn it back on.

No onscreen messages, just the Dell boot graphic restarting over and over? Does it have a 'progress bar'? How far does it get?

Reseated and swapped memory, I also presume? Substitute display card? If you're not getting past POST, there's a hardware failure of a fairly substantial nature (closer to the core than say, the IDE bus...which won't invoke auto-restart even if it fails). If it's something that plugs in, great. If not--ebay, or landfill.

A few (a few tens of thousands) Dell portables of that era had process issues with motherboard plating, but almost all of those showed up from thermal cycling within the first 100 hours of operation. Hard to imagine a process error lasting this long in a portable (a lot of vibration and thermal cycling) without causing a problem prior to now. But anything can happen.
If it's the plating issue, it's on an internal layer of the MB and due to timing issues you can't external-jumper it. Can't be saved.

Another process issue Dell portable motherboards had (prior to DDR) was memory data line termination resistors (the ceramic 4-paks). Microscope all of them for soldering integrity. Just one bad one will cause exactly what you're seeing.
_________________
Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'