[Beastman]

One of my friends gave me a HP Pavilion ze4400. He said that the power cord had gotten chewed by a cat and he had spliced it back together and it had been working fine for months. Then one night he turned the laptop towards his girlfriend to show her something and, apparently, the two wires touched each other. This caused a breaker to blow out in the house. The laptop turned off. Now when you press the power button the lights come on as if it is going to start up, the DVD drive spins and then stops like normal, (this happens everytime), then 9 times out of 10 it will shut off. And the other time it will stay on but wont continue to boot. It just sits there and generates heat over the cpu, and eventually after a while the fan will kick up as a result of it building heat. I have tried starting it with one stick of RAM, and without a hard drive. It couldnt care less, got the same result. I'm not a hardware guy but it seems to me that the power supply is still ok. By the way, the screen stays black the entire time, and sometimes I get a high pitched squeal out of the speakers that is BARELY audible, I have to put my ear to the speaker to even hear it. I realize this sounds pretty bad, but I'm pretty desperate to get it working also. Even if I have to almost rebuid it completly, that would be better than having to buy a new one. Any help at all would be great. Thanks.

P.S. When it blew he said there was no smoke and no smell.

Edited by Beastman, 25 July 2006 - 02:38 AM.

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Seems like the monitor got shorted on it. The high pitched whine could come from the wires also shorting the speakers too, or just some normal background noise that got a bit hyphenated.

If the monitor stays black, it means that there is no power feeding into the monitor. If it were to actually have power(but for some reason not boot), you'd see a white sort of glare over it if you had it on in the dark, like an LCD monitor with a black screen saver.

Hope that helps.

[reiphil]

Seems like the monitor got shorted on it. The high pitched whine could come from the wires also shorting the speakers too, or just some normal background noise that got a bit hyphenated.

If the monitor stays black, it means that there is no power feeding into the monitor. If it were to actually have power(but for some reason not boot), you'd see a white sort of glare over it if you had it on in the dark, like an LCD monitor with a black screen saver.

Hope that helps.

[WindyPants]

*blinks* I hope that you are not still trying to use the "jacked up" spliced cord. That is very dangerous to re-state the obvious.

What happens when you place the laptop on battery power only?

If it is the same result, then you may be looking at a total loss.