Gateway Solo 2150 w/ 400 MHz Celeron; 64 MB RAM; running
Windows 98. When power button is pressed the LED light for
power on lights and some normal noise of the hard drive heads
moving are heard but no BIOS splash screen or any kind of
display comes on. The system will just sit like that until I
depress the power button and hold to force a restart and then
the whole thing is repeated.
I’ve tried to boot off Windows CD and Norton CD as well as
Emergency Disk (floppy) but same things happen. AC adapter
seems to be working fine. Battery has been dead and user has
kept the system plugged to the AC adapter to use.
I replaced the hard drive but same symptoms occurred when
trying to boot up.
One more thing: about once every five tries, especially if I let the
system sit for an hour or so after trying to start it, the laptop
does boot fully and we can get into Windows. But the system will
freeze shortly after fully loading and then when I have to force
quit it goes back to the power on but no display or boot
situation. On occasion the system will freeze in the BIOS boot or
Windows startup as well.
Any thoughts? Looks like a flaky motherboard to me. Anyone
have another opinion? Since I tried a new hard drive and still got
the same symptoms, I think I’ve ruled out a drive problem. I also
took out the RAM with no change in symptoms.
Thanks.