A laptop conundrum

[digitalwanderer]

My cousin brought me his HP DV5000 to look at, he said the power connector was loose and it finally just didn't work anymore.

Well, that wasn't quite the issue...and it's got me a bit stumped right now.

The power connector in the laptop is a little squiggly, but I can pull the battery and boot up just fine with it plugged in so I'm pretty sure it's at least working. He's running the media center edition of XP and it tells me his battery is 100% charged or not present, depending on if it is in or not...but if I pull the plug from the laptop it will instantly shut down and refuse to do anything.

Other odd thing, it'll boot up just fine into XP with the battery in but if I boot into the BIOS it will shut down within a few seconds of getting into the BIOS.

I'm thinking it's something wonky in the power logic bits of the laptop, but I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here. Anyone have any experience with anything similar?

 

[digitalwanderer]

Oh, one more thing real quick, the battery is new. He replaced it first thing when the problem started happening. Also, I have a slightly newer HP here with the same power brick and I've interchanged them and his seems to be working just fine. (Realized these two bits of info were a bit crucial, sorry...starting to finally get ready for the holidays this weekend and this PC problem is just the thing I'm keeping in the back of my mind to ponder during the boring bits. I get to do a lot of cleaning today. <sigh> )

 

[digitalwanderer]

And finally, yeah I know it's a triple post. It's an experiment to see what the various results are.

 

[orangpelupa]

try putting his battery to your laptop?

btw the fan is spinning right?

 

[Blazkowicz]

If you boot under MS-DOS, does it shuts down itself?
I know, you probably don't want to play arkanoid and doom 2 (with no sound) but I'm curious, DOS is as bit as dumb as the BIOS ; if it doesn't shut down I don't know what the hell is going. Also DOS is for me a safe place to flash BIOS and firmware (usually) ; it can be obtained and put on bootable USB stick just by downloading HP USB storage tool.

So I'd just flash that BIOS, at worst done from Windows but of course power loss in the middle of it bricks the laptop.
(last time I flashed a BIOS, it was a bootable ISO, I mounted its content then extracted an archive in it that contained the BIOS flasher and image, then ran that from bare DOS myself. If I have no USB drive or the PC is too old I'll make a floppy image and boot it from network. I can't trust a CD-R or floppy, and a Windows install may be questionable or the PC itself may be unstable)

Also you can try a linux live USB (linux mint mate edition is safe) and see if you get same or different bugs.

 

[Mize]

btw the fan is spinning right?

This. Had a similar situation with an HP laptop where its fan exhaust and hsf was clogged with dust. Cleaned it out and all was well.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Hmmm. Yes, the fan has spun up...but it spins up and keeps running just fine as much as it spins up an shuts down. Doesn't seem to be related is what I'm saying, but I will check it when I open it up.

Can't switch batteries, different shapes...but my cousin already picked up a new battery less than 6 mos ago and it didn't do anything to fix the problem.

Also, I flashed the BIOS to the latest already in windows. It's stable in windows, as long as I don't try and install the HP power monitoring thingy. (It's SOOO freaking weird about that, it's acting just like how a virus does when it's trying to protect itself yet it's not a virus.)

Thanks for the input at least, it is appreciated. This one is weird.

 

[Lightman]

To me it sound like power regulator on motherboard died or PCB traces had broken up around power connector affecting the whole thing. I've seen quite a few laptops with exactly the same symptoms as yours and, the only easy solution is to replace motherboard which not always is cheaper than buying another 2nd hand laptop.
But don't give up and try few more things as you might get it working.

 

[eastmen]

are you sure its the real battery and not a knock off battery. That could be the problem.