Vista - I think I fried my laptop, How can I fix it? :(

Well, I have a laptop. The cord on it is slightly frayed at one point, so I put some electrical tape over it until I got a replacement charger for it. It had worked fine many, many times since then. Tonight it just turned off completely when I was in the middle of something when I slightly bumped it (very light bump with my leg, not enough to do any kind of physical damage). It didn't keep working off the battery as if the power was lost, it died instantly. The light for the power supply doesn't light up when I plug it in like it used to, and when I hit the power button it doesn't flash the power light to indicate no battery charge as it used to. It's now a fancy paperweight, and I'm not getting any kind of repsonse out of it. So, how do I fix it? What parts could have fried like that to where I wouldn't get any kind of response from the computer at all? Please, any and all advice would be GREATLY appreciated! I've had this laptop for a while, and it would be nice to have it for a while to come smile.gif Thanks in advance. Woody

Did your battery ever get charged at all when you used your laptop if not your battery is not good anymore. Have you gotten your new power supply and where was the cord damaged at.

Yeah, my battery has always worked fine, and always charged fine, but when I bumped it tonight it just shut down completely, it didn't just switch to battery power like I had lost the power or anything like that. The power cord was damaged right by where the cord turns into the plug that goes into your computer.

Ok let me get this straight you have tried you laptop without the power source and it will not turn on at all correct.

Correct, it doesn't respond to anything in any way now.

Well I don't know what to say only thing I can do is say I'm sorry

If your replacement charger is on its way, why not try it and see if it work upon arrival. Hope it is simply caused by a blown battery charger. At the same time you may check this out. I have one arriving tomorrow.

IBM ThinkPad T42 Laptop Computer - Intel Pentium M 735 1.5GHz, 512MB DDR, 40GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD Combo, 14.1'' XGA, Windows XP Home -Refurbished - T42 2374-E88 - Buy.com

HI Treehugger, and a belated welcome to the forums,

Sorry to hear about your problems,

Hopefully what has happened is that at some point the power to the charging circuit has stopped due to the damaged power cord, and when the battery has run out the laptop has simply shut down, Dit you receive any warning beeps at all?.

Of course the worst case scenario is that when the charger was nudged this caused a short on the cable and this could have caused damage to the charging circuit, if this is the case then I'm afraid that a replacement motherboard would probably be required .

You may want to remove the battery from the laptop for a few hours and then replace it. This can sometimes coax a little power from an exhausted battery. Also when you receive the new charger unit I would allow the unit to charge the battery for at least an hour as the battery will be totally exhausted and will need this time to recover.

Hope it's only a discharged battery problem and the new charger will solve your problems.

No, that's the thing, normally when my computer is on battery power, and then dies, the power light will flash when I press the power button, but now it's not flashing or anything. I have a new power cord coming to replace mine anyways, but I can tell from the way my comp's acting (or not reacting) that it's not just the cord. I also tried that, I had removed the battery from my comp for 3hrs to determine if I could reset it that way, and it didn't restart. I tried starting it with each card of RAM seperately, to test if I had blown one, but didn't work either.

Ok, it's more than just the RAM. I just bought 2 new sticks today, and tested them out. Still nothing. What else should I check?