i took in this really sweet, slightly older alienware laptop… 2.6i7/16/ssd/hdd/3gb gtx760… it came in for a battery, as it didn’t have one installed. no problem. popped in a battery and passed the machine along…
well it turns out, it probably had the battery removed, maybe for the following reason:[br]
the machine doesn’t power on consistently. often times, pressing the power button will cause the LEDs to light up for a moment, fans and dvd to spin, but then it immediately cuts off. sometimes it’ll try to start twice in a row, but never a third time without another button press. when it cannot be coerced to start, i can remove the internal battery, hold the power button for ~10sec, then replace the battery or wall power and it fires right up like nothing happened.
the machine can be rebooted any number of times without fail. it can sleep and wake without fail. if i do a full power down, all bets are off as to whether it comes back. perhaps it’s a coincidence that the battery was removed? perhaps the previous owner had figured out the trick to turn it on, and never used it on battery power anyway…
i would value any suggestions as to where to start. it’s running the latest bios