Laptop won't turn on except when making Click noise

Like the title says; I have a Dell L400 (oldie P3 700) recently the battery just went completly dead, won't charge, dell doesn't even recronize its there, when until then it had about 2 hours of net surfing life

Also it won't turn on! Okay thats a lie, when I plug it into the wall it won't trun on except sometimes it makes a quite clicking noise and then if I hold down the power button it turn on, but to get it to boot I have to enter bios and hit F10 to save and reboot and then it loads up windows like everything is fine.

PS CMOS battery has been dead since I got it; but that shouldn't make any diffrence cause it used to work fine.

The clikcing noise is coming from the cpu area, it has never been dropped.

you might need to buy a new mobo man, i had a 400mhz l400 that this started happening to

Lionsault_100 said:

you might need to buy a new mobo man, i had a 400mhz l400 that this started happening to

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So this is most likly a mobo issue correct? A real shame I just barely bought it.

do the fans run? could it be the harddrive that you here?i can here mine click when it first comes on

mewisemagic2 said:

do the fans run? could it be the harddrive that you here?i can here mine click when it first comes on

Click to expand...

no when it won't turn on nothing turns on. Then I come back 15 mintues later (although sometimes its hours) and its making the little clicking noise and then I can get it to turn on.

Try disconnnecting the hard drive, see if it boots consistently. Clicking is the tell tale sign of a dead hard drive, regardless if it's a laptop or desktop.

Pinky said:

Try disconnnecting the hard drive, see if it boots consistently. Clicking is the tell tale sign of a dead hard drive, regardless if it's a laptop or desktop.

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Your not hearing me, its not that the Laptop won't boot, it actually won't power on. The harddrive is fully spun down. And just to be srue I took it out. But no, the screen won't turn on I get no LEDs nothing. Except if it happens to make the clicking noise, then it will turn on if I play around with the power button a bit. And ofcourse once its on it doesn't make the clicking noise.

have you tryed taking it apart and turnign it on and seeing which part is making the noise

Rpkole said:

have you tryed taking it apart and turnign it on and seeing which part is making the noise

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Yeah what ever it is is under the cpu cooling / heat sink retaining plate. How wierd is that? I allready confirmed that its not the CPU fan.

Any ideas?