My wife was using my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500) and the thing just crashed. She was using a program called Second Life. She said the graphics went a little weird and there was an error message. The screen went black and emitted a couple of beeps. She left it alone and then it let out a long, continuous beep for about 2 minutes. She pressed and held the power button until the laptop shutdown.
Now when we try to turn it back on it ends up going to a blank dark screen. The laptop powers down simply by pressing the power button once. Sometimes I can see the screen suggesting I press F2 as an option (like before) but nothing happens. Occasionally it will boot up all way to the starting screening displaying the system loading but it eventually goes black.
I took out the hard drive and backed it up to another hard drive. Does anyone know a way I can fix this problem? I thought I might be able to restore the system, but I can find a restore CD that came with the computer. Plus I can't interact with the system. My end all solution will be to get another laptop if I can't fix this one.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Hey there SeanJohn79, have you tried hooking an external monitor to your laptop. You can move the video output back and forth, from external, LCD + external, LCD using Fn + F7. Hopefully this will allow you to see the necessary info for diagnosing the problem. Good Luck. Keep us posted! In case you are not aware, these are some display related key functions:
Fn + F3 = turn off lcd
Fn + F8 =Switch computer screen size
Fn + F12 =Hibernation mode, power for 4 secs releases.
Fn + F4 = Standby mode, press Fn key to return to normal
If you haven't tried switching some of these, give it a shot.
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Thanks a lot for the suggestions guys. I used the F8 key to boot my system in safe mode. While in safe mode, I had a lot of graphic distortion with lines steaming through. That kind of stuff. I ran Norton AntiVirus and scanned for viruses, but nothing was found.
I tried restoring the system back to an earlier date. The first attempt was unsuccessful. The second one brought be back to the computer blacking out. While it's booting the random lines appear but no loading screen. I'm trying my best to get back to safe mode. If I'm able to do that, what do you guys think I should do?
if you have gone this far as: "Occasionally it will boot up all way to the starting screening displaying the system loading..", then you may try hitting F8 just after the BIOS screen to select safe mode-last known good startup...
does the same thing on reboot after restore
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