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Inspiron 1526, It's dead, Jim!


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Oh no, not another old Dell laptop! This time it's a serious case of a very dead Inspiron 1526. Absolutely zero response to the power button, except holding Fn then pressing power makes the Numlock LED blink steadily, the Capslock LED come on while the Scroll lock LED stays off.

 

Nobody seems to know what dire condition this diagnostic code is for, not even Dell. Some people have resurrected their 1526 (or 1525 by replacing the CMOS battery. I put in a new one while I had it apart to replace the power input board to fix the broken power jack. So it's not a dead CMOS battery. The one removed was 0.6 volt. I checked the new one, slightly over 3 volts.

 

Plugged it in and the battery charged normally, with the LED progressing from on to blinking to off. I didn't try turning it on until it was charged.

 

I've tried holding the power button for various lengths of time with it unplugged and the battery out and tried plugging it in with and without the button held. Dead, still dead, yup, still dead. Tried a different CPU I know is good, still dead. Tested the RAM in another laptop, it's good.

 

I'm guessing that when whatever happened to the power jack happened, it shorted as it broke and spiked the mainboard. They're not too spendy on eBay. Is it possible to swap in a 1525 board to convert it to Intel CPU? If I'm going to throw money at this one, what was the highest display resolution available, if there were options on that for this model?

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