HP laptop won't even POST :(

[cyrusjumpjet]

I have a feeling I know what the answer's gonna be, but I'll ask anyway.

I recently purchased an HP laptop used from a guy off craigslist (I know, I know). I just wanted something cheap that I could sit in bed and browse the web on. It's an HP DV9720 with an AMD Turion 64 X2 CPU.

To make a long story short, it's suddenly refusing to boot. After I hit the power button, the blue power light will light up and the fans start up, but after 2 seconds, it turns off. 5 seconds later, it'll do the same thing all over again. It just keeps trying to boot like that until I pull the battery. I've also tried it without the battery and just running off AC power. Nothing helps though.

Any ideas? What should I start troubleshooting first? I have a feeling it's just going to be something like "the mobo's fried" and I'm SOL. I only spent $250 on it in the first place so I'm not going to ship it off to HP. Thanks in advance.

 

[Mark56]

First thing I would do is test the hard drive, then hook the hard drive up to another PC and run a full virus scan with Malwarebytes. Please state the OS.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

Identify the make of your hard drive and then use one of the links below to get the manufacturers diagnostic for ISO CD. Burn the image file to a CD, boot the PC with the disc in the drive and run the diagnostics. You first need to set the CD drive to 1st in the boot order in the Bios setup.

If you do not have an image burner use this free software to make the CD.

http://www.isoimageburner.com/


ExcelStor: http://www.excelstor.com/eng/support.php?sub_id=3

Hitachi/IBM: http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_es.html

Toshiba Fujitsu: http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=SoftwareUtilities#diagnostic

Seagate, Maxtor & Quantum:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads

Western Digital:http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I don't think OS or any other software has much to do with this if the thing won't even boot that far. Try removing its memory and putting it back.