I went to my aunt's house over the weekend, and she wanted me to look at a laptop she'd bought for $10 at a flea market. It's an HP Omnibook 4150, with 64MB RAM, a 366? MHz PII, and a 4Gb harddrive.

She wanted to know if she could upgrade anything so her neices could play games on it, and, being the awesome tinkerer I am, decide to take the harddrive out to see if it could be upgraded. I had to take the battery out first to get to the harddrive module (the harddrive is inside a black case with a plug on the side that plugs into a slot on the inside of the laptop), so I pulled that out, took the module apart to get to the harddrive, saw that it could be upgraded, put it back together, put it back in the laptop, slid the battery back in, and powered on the laptop.

Nothing. No POST. No BIOS screen. Nothing.

Oh, the power light comes on, and the CPU fan spins up for around 3 seconds, then dies away. It won't even turn back off until I pull the battery. The CPU isn't even getting warm, which leaves me to believe the board isn't getting much power. I've tried reseating the memory and the CPU and the harddrive.


Soooo, any suggestions?