I am trying to fix a dell labtop for a friend. "DEll Latitude cpx" He brought it over a few days ago because it was stuck at scandisk before we went into win98 (yes win98) so I just bypassed the scan , and got into windows fine. Then 2 days later he says it won't even turn on, so I have a look at it and well it doesn't. I push the power button , the on light come on for about 5 sec. Battery light flickers and then it dieds , thats it. I have since try turning it on without the battery , just pluged into the wall no luck. Then try , no HD , No pcmic cards , no CD rom still same thing light come on for 5 sec thats it. Anyone have any clue about this. I did I google search and found a few simplar problems with this model of dell but no real answers , Any replays would be great thanks :) T-Boy

I'm having a similar problem, with a friends Acer laptop, I plug it in and hit power and the standby comes on for a couple seconds then it just shorts out. I know the reason for it though, his mom spilled bottled water on it. It turned out to be a problem with the internal power supply, im seein about gettin it fixed right now, at a free lance electronics expert locally. Check the power supply im sure thats your problem

I have seen this problem when the battaery was entirely shot and it wouldn't run with the AC adapter whether the dead battery was in or not. A usable battery solved the problem. Do you have someone with a similar model or one that at least takes the same battery to check with? Many Dells of that era are interchangeable on this matter.