Repairing a faulty laptop

I picked up a Compaq laptop for a song, a 1215US with 1GHz AMD CPU and maxed memory. The issue is it won't power up at all. Power supply is fine, power port is not broken (as they are often with 1200 series) but I did notice when I plugged the power, there was arcing on the mainboard between the power jack and the SMD labeled F501 (SMD is about 10mm wide, 5mm long, 3mm high, all white except for silver ends, only has a 5 marked on it. A 5 ohms high watt resistor?) When I measure with my multimeter, I am reading only 12 ohms between + and - of power in, so likely a short somewhere.

LCD is good, CPU is good, RAM is good, just about everything except the mainboard. I would have liked to turn this one into a 14" digital frame with wireless network for remotely updating pictures.

Anyone know where I can find a more detailed information on the mainboard or a schematic? Or where I can find a replacement motherboard part # 234894-001 dirt cheap? I checked eBay, they are going for around $100 or more, a bit steep for a 10 year old laptop. There is one "untested" but $20 with $15 ground shipping seems excessive.

I'd provide detailed picture of the area of issue but my current camera died and my new one is still somewhere in Romulus (MI, not the planet in Star Trek universe)

F is usually the designation for a fuse.
Yes, they do make SMD fuses (wow, what a tough fuse to replace!)
If you blew a fuse, then that would explain why no power up.

As for the 12 ohms, blown fuse not withstanding, perhaps you are seeing the load
of the charging circuit. 12 ohms doesn't necessarily indicate a short circuit. For example,
by ohm's law, 18V into a 12 ohm load will draw 1.5A, not so unusual. And for loads that
change resistance as voltage/current changes, an ohmmeter tells you nothing about a
device's true characteristics under normal operation.

What is the voltage and current rating of your power supply?

power supply is 19v max 3.16A.

And blown fuse wouldn't cause visible arcing. :/ I'll try to remove that one. Hopefully without burning up anything or ripping copper traces.

I just got my new camera in when the battery's charged I'll take photo of the area and a short video of the arcing.

There ya go. It's flashing because the external power supply has protection and when short happens, it shuts down for a second.

The circuit pads under the fuse are connected to both side of the fuse. It is possible the fuse itself is blown and something is letting the current jump across the gap under the fuse. Since it shorts right away the internal power regulator is probably bad.

WTB: schematic for this so I could trace it and find the source of short. The board is multi-level, and some through PCB holes are often under components so visually tracing is not possible.

in order value a true resistor value you MUST have the component out of the circuit or at least 1 end of the circuit needs to be disconnected from teh circuit. i would remove everythinig but the motherboard and look around for burn spots or smell for burnt stuff.

Everything's been removed except for CPU. The only sign of burn smell is right at the fuse.