I was in the middle of a game on AC power when it powered off instantly, as if it had been on battery only and gone dead flat.

Pressing the power button has no effect. No lights, no fan spin, no boot attempt at all.

I checked the power supply and battery were seated ok and all looked fine, but no joy.

I then went through various troubleshooting steps:

• Remove battery, AC only
• Remove AC, battery only
• remove ram
• remove hdd
• remove WiFi card
• remove Blu-ray drive

No effect, still no life at all. I had read that bad hardware could have been preventing boot.

Then:

• Checked AC adapter output voltage. 19.5V
• Tried to check battery voltage, very difficult due to the connectors. It appeared to be giving me 0.1V or less, but I'm not convinced I was able to get a decent connection.

I then noticed that if I plugged the AC adapter in to the laptop then removed it the voltage drops to 1.2 V ish and slowly drops down towards 0.

It looked like the adapter was tripping after being plugged in so I wanted to test if it was the adapter or the laptop. I rigged up a bulb as a makeshift load, about 20-40W draw and it lit fine and the adapter voltage was steady afterward.

This made me suspect a DC in problem or short on the motherboard as if the adapter was faulty I'd have expected to see it cutting out under my test load (since it does this even when plugged into the laptop with no battery to charge).

Finally I removed the motherboard to inspect it but can see no obvious sign of damage.

So, my own thought is that likely the mobo is dead and that possibly the battery is suspect too.

A replacement mobo is probably around £100 + battery but I'm hesitant to start spending money on it. Concerned that I could end up breaking new components if I'm wrong etc.

Question time:

• Comments on what I've found
• agree/disagree about my conclusions?
• anything else to try?
• is it worth trying to replace the motherboard?
• anything I've missed?

Any suggestions very welcome!!

⟐ Answer edited February 28, 2024 at 17:44 MST

PS seems to be a big issues with these modeles. Also this was origonal installed with 8.1 pro

⟐ Commented November 12, 2020 at 11:07 MST

⟐ Commented November 16, 2019 at 0:16 MST

⟐ Answer edited October 21, 2018 at 19:20 MST

⟐ Commented February 28, 2024 at 22:17 MST

⟐ Commented June 14, 2023 at 3:26 MST

When put the charger in the light from the cable charger turns off

⟐ Answered December 26, 2022 at 21:00 MST

⟐ Answer edited October 19, 2022 at 9:54 MST

As above, I have a Dell Inspirion 7737 that detects when the charging cable is plugged in but will not charge any battery.

Failed attempts to fix so far;

• Bought new dell battery
• Flashed bios to latest A17
• Windows fully updated
• Uninstalled the AC drivers, rebooted with and without battery/AC etc
• Tried Dells driver update tool, nothing of note
• Bios showing AC adaptor as unknown (same for 2 different chargers) and battery shows as working normally

I think it’s possibly a motherboard fault as there looks to be a shorted capacitor (P 110) near the charge port area [see attached]. Any ideas if this could be the culprit?

Any advise would be much appreciated :)

JohnO

⟐ Commented March 21, 2021 at 20:51 MST

⟐ Commented February 23, 2020 at 17:11 MST

everything seemed to work fine except the trackpad wasn’t clicking. tracking worked fine.

i disassembled the laptop to clean everything out and see if the clicker offered any adjustment. no adjustment, but i cleaned everything out and made all of the connections.

now i have no input in windows. i can F2 my way into bios, navigate around in there, but as soon as OS loads, i only have the touch screen. i have checked and reseated all cable connections. the only thing i can imagine is that all of the case screws are needed to complete a ground circuit?

i don’t want to put this whole thing back together if it needs more work…

⟐ Answer accepted October 13, 2018 at 19:58 MST

⟐ Answer accepted December 07, 2017 at 20:07 MST

Thanks

Anthony

⟐ Commented April 05, 2017 at 17:14 MST

(1) Thus the question . . . why would anyone pay for genuine Dell screws?

We know the sizes.

(2) Who supplies better quality screws?

(3) How would I know the screws are better before purchase? Any seller could push their url without giving any fact based reasons their screws are any better. Please don’t waste our time with low quality screws most likely made in China.

Thanks in advance

This is how it looks as you can see there is a wierd effect on all the icons and the start button region has a wood texture

⟐ Commented May 10, 2018 at 7:42 MST