Dell Laptop is broken......

[tricky69]

I am assuming there are loads of tech minded people on this site so was hoping someone might be able to help..

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, about 3/4 years old. Unfortunatly it has a problem and will not boot... warranty has run out and therefore i need to take it somewhere to get it fixed.

Does anyone know someone in the south east or london who i can trust ?
Was going to take it to PC world, but a bit dubious as to weather they can help ?
Anyone ever use them? are they any good ?

Thanks for any help

[R998]

What do you mean by 'it wont boot'?

Does it turn on at all, if so how far along the boot process before (I presume) freezing?

[a2z]

It's not the battery is it? Many are subject to a recal.

[xjsjohn]

tricky69 said:

I am assuming there are loads of tech minded people on this site so was hoping someone might be able to help..

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, about 3/4 years old. Unfortunatly it has a problem and will not boot... warranty has run out and therefore i need to take it somewhere to get it fixed.

Does anyone know someone in the south east or london who i can trust ?
Was going to take it to PC world, but a bit dubious as to weather they can help ?
Anyone ever use them? are they any good ?

Thanks for any help

personally i would avoid PC world ...

does it start up at all ??? do you get to BIOS (do you get the Dell) bit, does it actually try and load (i assume) Windows? or completely dead?

Any funny messages, any blue screens full of gibberish?

[chim_knee]

It's not a Dell Etch-a-sketch, is it?

[chrisgr31]

There is a place in Crawley called Tek Express which might be worth considering. They fix laptops but can' say how good, expensive, cheap etc they are!

[tricky69]

R998 said:

What do you mean by 'it wont boot'?

Does it turn on at all, if so how far along the boot process before (I presume) freezing?

It does not get to the windows loading page.... the dell symbol comes up when you turn it on then an error message apears. White text black background... can't remeber what it says but it stops the boot sequence, but gives you the option to continue but when you try it just appears with the same message below accompanied with a double beep noise. Occasionally if i keep switching it on and off it will eventually load and then work fine but that normally means switching it on and off 30/35 times !! which can't be good....

sorry i am not very tech savy, i have tried re installin windows but will not let me boot from the disk even after changing the boot sequence...

It is not a battery problem, i did turn it over and bang it on the back but did not help so not an etch-a-sketch either....

[Idlehands]

Have you tried booting up from a floppy disk instead?

Sadly laptops are often so expensive to fix that you're often better getting a new (and much faster) model.

[Touching Cloth]

Sounds very much like a hard-drive failure to me, was it getting noisy at all, like clicking a lot.

[tricky69]

Touching Cloth said:

Sounds very much like a hard-drive failure to me, was it getting noisy at all, like clicking a lot.

now that you mention it it did seem a bit noisier... if it is that, is that good night vienna ?

[Plotloss]

Harddrives are usually simple to replace and cheap too.

I've bought one for my thinkpad this morning for £26

[tricky69]

Plotloss said:

Harddrives are usually simple to replace and cheap too.

I've bought one for my thinkpad this morning for £26

ok... do i have to buy a dell one ? If they are easy to replace can i do it my self or best take it somewhere ?

[panclan]

A hard drive can be replaced by yourself, all you will need is a screwdriver and if you can find it online the location of the drive bay if you don't already know where it is. The hard drive does not neet to be a Dell supplied drive.

[tricky69]

panclan said:

A hard drive can be replaced by yourself, all you will need is a screwdriver and if you can find it online the location of the drive bay if you don't already know where it is. The hard drive does not neet to be a Dell supplied drive.

does not require soldering or anything like that ?

what does the harddrive look like ? Is there a certain size i need to go for ?
whats the best make, size... etc

[Touching Cloth]

You have mentioned changing the boot sequence above so I reckon you are more than techical enough. Feels better to do it yourself that's for sure. If you have the discs to reload then it is a piece of piss really.
The bugger is if you had stuff you need on the old hard drive. It might well still be there, I bought myself a usb laptop hard drive caddy from maplins for about £20, once I had windows up and running on new hard drive, plugged in caddy and was actually able to see and copy over all the contents of My Docs which was a godsend. It depends on your old harddrive however and you might still get nothign of it.

[Tripps]

tricky69 said:

does not require soldering or anything like that ?

what does the harddrive look like ? Is there a certain size i need to go for ?
whats the best make, size... etc

Dell ones are very simple to replace thankfully, you'll just need a 2.5" drive (rather than the usual 3.5" ). Probably worth going for as big as you can afford, as you'll always regret it later (my 120GB laptop drive full after 2 years usage). Not sure on which Brands are best right now, I think the original Dell units were IBM, so you might want to go for something other than that...

I've got an Insprion 9100, so may be able to point you in the right direction on fitting if the 8100 is similar.

Edited by Tripps on Monday 25th September 14:30

[panclan]

tricky69 said:

panclan said:

A hard drive can be replaced by yourself, all you will need is a screwdriver and if you can find it online the location of the drive bay if you don't already know where it is. The hard drive does not neet to be a Dell supplied drive.

does not require soldering or anything like that ?

what does the harddrive look like ? Is there a certain size i need to go for ?
whats the best make, size... etc

On an 8100 the hard drive is behind the cover next to the PC card slots on the right side of the laptop you can see on these pages http://support.dell.com/support/edocs

As for size, I wuld look for something from 40Gb or bigger, I don't know if the laptop has a max hard drive capacity. Hitachi IBM make good drives, but most makes will be ok.

Edited by panclan on Monday 25th September 14:25

Edited by panclan on Monday 25th September 14:25

[Touching Cloth]

Of course it might NOT be the harddrive. Just covering myself before spend money and then find you have to send it into a shop anyway. Certainly it gets my vote though.

[tricky69]

Touching Cloth said:

Of course it might NOT be the harddrive. Just covering myself before spend money and then find you have to send it into a shop anyway. Certainly it gets my vote though.

well the tech guys here share the same view so thats good enough for me.....

i have remember part of the error message.... primary 'something' failure - that sounds like a hard drive issue to me.... and would that fact that some times it would load also point to it being a hard drive issue ?

[Tripps]

tricky69 said:

i have remember part of the error message.... primary 'something' failure - that sounds like a hard drive issue to me.... and would that fact that some times it would load also point to it being a hard drive issue ?

It could be a "primary controller failure", less likely but I've seen it happen on a desktop once.

Might be worth seeing if you can try someone else's drive, or try your drive in another laptop perhaps...