Does this have anything to do with the motherboard?

Question

I have a Dell Latitude C640 that I haven't even had for a whole year. My mother bought the laptop from the county, since they were selling them for $300. The first problem was in February near Valentine's Day when my power cord stopped working. I didn't get a replacement until about April, since I had another computer that could be used. Problems started again in late July when one night I turned my laptop off and it didn't come on the next morning. The lights would come on, but the screen wouldn't come on for anything. Two days later the laptop screen turned on again, and was working fine. The problem now was half of the keys on the computer didn't work, and the mouse pad only works for about ten minutes. This isn't good, because the laptop only has one USB port. About two weeks later the computer started acting up again, and a message popped up on the screen twice. The first time it automatically restarted the computer, the second time I turned the computer off and it wasn't completely unresponsive like before and the screen just doesn't come on. Is this something with the motherboard?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem before with an HP laptop.  It turned out to be a bad hard drive.  I know it sounds like hardware, but with mine the bad drive was corrupting the operating system data and causing the weird problems.  It's worth a shot.  Try booting to a cd such as the windows disk for whatever version you're using.  If you don't have that disc, download BartP.E. Ultimate Boot Disk and try booting to it.  Let it sit and run for a while to see if it starts acting up.  If everything seems to work fine when booted to the disk, its probably software related, which could be caused by a bad hard drive.  Within either of these bootable disks, there is a checkdisk function that you can run to see if you get errors.  On the windows disk, run the recovery console and type 'chkdsk'.  If you get any errors, then you know the culprit.

If it does act up when booted to disk, it is either your motherboard or bad memory.  Memtest86 is a good program that you can burn to a bootable disk and run to check for bad memory sticks.  

Answer 2

I would inspect the wires in the laptop that provide electrical supply. It is definetly an intermittent power issue.