Hello!

First I would like to thank you for even opening this thread! I really
appreciate your interest!

One of my customers gave me her laptop to fix. She said she has
spilled "some" wine on it. She also said that she was trying to turn
the computer on after the thing happend, so I decided to give it
a try as well just to see what exactly is happening. Before I did it
thouhg I have taken most of the parts I could and let it dry for
24h under my desk lamp (no, they didn't get too hot :P). After
it seemed to be dry I put all the parts together and I tried to
turn the laptop on. Nothing appeared on the screen so I knew
it is either the screen or the video card (or both). Then I started
taking part by part out and tried it in my Toshiba; RAM was fine,
but HDD was dead, so I've got it replaced. Now... I have taken
the whole laptop apart till I've got to the video card. On the monitor
connector there are some black "burning marks". I took the video
card out and on the motherboard the video card's connector is
also burned. My question is (may be rethorical, but it's always
better to ask :P): is that possible that after replacing just the
video card laptop will come back to live, or most likely video
and the whole mobo need to be replaced?

P.S. Of course I won't call Dell and tell them what happened,
because the warranty is voided.

Thank you for your help!

Regards,

Matt Abes

Can you try the video card in another machine? Or another vid card in this one?

It's hard to diagnose just by burn marks. Could have been just the residue of the initial flash. You might try cleaning both connections.

I cleaned both connections and it started to work fine!

Now I tried to install windows on it, but it stopped on the step where it
is suppose to bring you from that 3 colours screen to the full GUI of
the installation - I believe the last thing it says is "Starting Windows..."
and that's it - it's not going any further. Also the CPU fan started to
spin really loudly, but I guess I can ignore that for now.

The keyboard is not working as well. I took all the keys out
and I pretty much stripped the whole keyboard and tried to
clean/dry it. Still not working, so I guess I will just get DELL
to send me a new one, but I am also thinking that once they'll
get the old one they may find out what the real cause of the
problem was, so I might as well just buy a replacement keyboard.

I'll work on it for a bit more tonight and I will see what happens!

So far thank you for your help, and by the way I am very impressed
with the amout of post you have written and the time it took you
to respond to my thread! Thank you very much!

Matt

Thanks for the thanks et al

Are you installing XP? From a retail disk or an OEM?

Can you pinpoint the failure point? Is it after the 40 minute point or right off the bat?

You can scroll down this page to view the various screenshots of an install:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

I wonder how you even get anywhere without a keyboard

Hey!

I managed to boot from a WinXP LiveCD... and I can tell that
I am impressed with what my past 3h has brought ;]
Keyboard is working... partially ;]
The only keys that don't work are "G" and "H"
and also when I press "5", "6" and "-" buttons the
actual character appears, but the computer also
acts as I would press right-click after the button,
so I guess there is still something wrong with the
keyboard. I've just run AIDA32 to check what is
present (recognized) in the system, and it looks
like everything is being properly recognized!!!
The hard drive I just installed is not formatted
but is visible, so it's all good! And btw. since when
DELL has 7200RPM drives in ther notebooks?
Ok - I will try to get the keyboard working properly
and then I will install OS... If I will have any problems
I will post them!

THANK YOU VERY MUCH AGAIN!!!!

Regards,

Matt