Hello Everyone,
I have an old (3 years) Compaq Presario 2500 (p/n DP662AV) laptop that was working fine until my son spilled a cup of water in it. He then proceeded to turn it off, clean up the outside, pack it away in its case, and not tell me about it until a week later, when my daughter pulled it out and booted it up. At that point, it wouldn't boot successfully.
I pulled the battery, opened it up as much as I could, and left it out to air dry. After that, it did successfully boot up a couple of times, but not reliably. I then proceeded to take it completely apart and leave it out to dry (well, it was no longer under warranty, so I wasn't voiding anything). I put it back together again, but it still won't boot.
The power is working, the battery charges, the power/network/sound/etc. lights come on, the fans spin up, it sounds like the boot is hitting the CD-ROM drive, but the screen is blank, no BIOS or anything. To verify that it wasn't a problem with the display, I hooked on an external one, and tried to get it to boot from a Linux boot disk, but to no avail.
At this point, I've done everything I can think of except for cleaning the motherboard with distilled water. The other thing I was wondering was if a short in the computer or the long, unplugged storage time had reset the BIOS. The Presario manual I have says that if you replace the motherboard, you have to reset the BIOS from a floppy before you can boot. I'm wondering if the same thing might help my situation.
So, what do you think? Fired hardware? Or possible software problem?
Thanks,
- Bill