HP Presario V4000 Notebook

[Charles]

Will not boot. Power light, hard drive light on. Doesn't seem to be a power problem. I used different hard drives and they behave the same way. Black screen. Tried entering setup to no avail, nothing shows.

2 possible things come to mind. LCD screen went bad or RTS battery(hard to believe since this is only about 3 yrs. old).

Any other troubleshooting ideas?

Thanks.

[Panama Red]

Are you sure it's not booting but you just can't see the image on the screen? Try shining a flashlight onto the screen and see if you can see a dark image of Windows. Make sure you use your original hard drive or you'll be dealing with other issues. If the image is there, you've either lost the backlight tube or the inverter board has died - or both.

[glc]

Try an external monitor too.

[Charles]

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried the monitor and nothing showed on the screen. It doesn't seem to be going thru the BIOS. What happens when these RTC batteries run out of juice? Would disconnecting and reconnecting the battery be a good idea?

I'm thinking a bad board could also be the culprit.

Any other ideas.

[glc]

A dead RTC battery will cause the bios to reset to defaults - it should not prevent a POST.

[Charles]

That makes sense. Any other suggestions or ways to confirm this may be a bad motherboard?

[Charles]

Reset memory for the second time and problem fixed. Weird. Wonder if there is a time issue with resetting memory. Another thing I suspect about this laptop is closing the lid on it when it's on. Once it killed a hard drive before and now it just would'nt boot. So I set all the settings on power scheme to not go into stand by.

Compaq Presario V4000.

Any comments from experience out there?

[glc]

My only experience with Presario laptops is bad. They are cheap laptops for the big box market, made to meet price points, essentially no quality.