Dell 600m Notebook won't charge

[MotekGuy]

My son has a Dell 600m notebook, 2 years old, out of warranty. One day while working on the notebook, it notified him that it was running on battery, no longer hooked up to the wall outlet (it was, in fact, plugged in). It ran as long as the battery lasted, and that was it. It does not recognize that the power supply is plugged in. Tried it with a different Dell power brick, no change. Dell tells us that it needs a new motherboard, costing about $800. Seeing as I can buy a new, similar notebook for about that price, it doesn't make sense to me to spend that kind of money. Before I parcel out the parts, I'd like to try repairing it myself. I've downloaded the manual from Dell. Before I start, does anybody out there have any tips about troubleshooting this kind of a problem?

This is a Centrino model, Pentium M 1.3GHz, with 768Mb RAM. I've already tried taking out memory, disks, etc. per Dell's instructions.

Thanks in advance...

[flanzig1]

On many laptops, the charger is part of the mother board. So, if the charger is bad, the mother board needs to be changed.