Just reading this forum and I had such a surprise over the weekend with this one so thought I'd share it with everyone.
At the weekend I went camping and took my laptop with me, we use the laptop for a TV with a TV card when we go camping and thought that's what we'd do.
I was so shocked when I got to the site and realised the laptop just wouldn't switch on, all that I was getting was the DVD drive clicking, and the hard drive clicking and that was it.
Trying to think of anything it may been - I thought at first the hard drive had dislodged itself, or the DVD drive because early that day we'd been through an awful street in Liverpool full of potholes (it really was the worst street ever - nearly took the bottom out of my car on potholes can't believe the council would let a major route like this get so bad!).
Unfortunately when camping I had no screwdriver to check the hard drive or anything so left it till I got home.
When I got home I took the hard drive out, memory, DVD drive, Wi-Fi card and re-connected them all - nothing.
At this point I thought oh no has something seriously failed, then I thought a few days ago my laptop clock kept acting up, keeping the wrong time, and resetting to a few days beforehand.
I wondered whether it might just be the CMOS battery was flat - although I doubted it because when I've come across this in the past normally the computer just boots up and warns you that it's reset the CMOS to default settings.
Luckily I had a spare CR2032 battery in my spare car key so I changed it just to check, and guess what - the laptop worked and it came up with a warning that the CMOS had been reset.
That is so strange because I would never have thought that a dead CMOS battery could cause modern computers to stop working, as I've come across plenty of old computers from the past that work fine with a dead CMOS battery, mind you I have found that the BIOS in this Compaq laptop is a lot more stranger than a standard PC BIOS because even removing things like hard drives, and DVD drives in a laptop can force it to just not boot at all with no error messages, not really very helpful when your trying to diagnose a fault!
At the weekend I went camping and took my laptop with me, we use the laptop for a TV with a TV card when we go camping and thought that's what we'd do.
I was so shocked when I got to the site and realised the laptop just wouldn't switch on, all that I was getting was the DVD drive clicking, and the hard drive clicking and that was it.
Trying to think of anything it may been - I thought at first the hard drive had dislodged itself, or the DVD drive because early that day we'd been through an awful street in Liverpool full of potholes (it really was the worst street ever - nearly took the bottom out of my car on potholes can't believe the council would let a major route like this get so bad!).
Unfortunately when camping I had no screwdriver to check the hard drive or anything so left it till I got home.
When I got home I took the hard drive out, memory, DVD drive, Wi-Fi card and re-connected them all - nothing.
At this point I thought oh no has something seriously failed, then I thought a few days ago my laptop clock kept acting up, keeping the wrong time, and resetting to a few days beforehand.
I wondered whether it might just be the CMOS battery was flat - although I doubted it because when I've come across this in the past normally the computer just boots up and warns you that it's reset the CMOS to default settings.
Luckily I had a spare CR2032 battery in my spare car key so I changed it just to check, and guess what - the laptop worked and it came up with a warning that the CMOS had been reset.
That is so strange because I would never have thought that a dead CMOS battery could cause modern computers to stop working, as I've come across plenty of old computers from the past that work fine with a dead CMOS battery, mind you I have found that the BIOS in this Compaq laptop is a lot more stranger than a standard PC BIOS because even removing things like hard drives, and DVD drives in a laptop can force it to just not boot at all with no error messages, not really very helpful when your trying to diagnose a fault!
