Dell Laptop

When you power on the machine, take a look at the lock leds just above the keyboard. There are 3 error codes on that system (taking 'on' as 1 and 'off' as 0 and reading the lights from left to right):

001 - processor failure 010 - Motherboard Failure 011 - Memory failure. If only the first one is on, thats the numlock light, the system might be in the process of trying to start up. You could then try a diagnostic boot up by holding down the 'i' button (or Access Direct button) and then pressing the on button. The system should fire up and try to run a quick system check.

If you are getting any combination of the LEDs apart from 1-0-0 (which is what you;d get on a normal power up) then call Dell to troubleshoot. Your best bet is to remove all the bits you can - cd, hard drive, memory, modem, wireless card, bluetooth etc, see if without the memory you get the 011 code which shows that some part of the system is still working. Put the memory in and see what happens next and rebuild the machine piece by piece until its either working or you know whats wrong.

I don't think Dell will sell you the BIOS chip on it's own, I don't think they have it available as a separate part. As a result you probably can't get it from one of their third party suppliers either - but you could try anyway :

/ co.uk depending on your location. Another thing you could try if you know someone who is both gullible and the owner of an Inspiron 5100, if you pull their BIOS chip off their motherboard (accessable through the memory hatch I think) and put it onto yours, then boot up from a BIOS update CD, and just before you press the confirmation to wipe the old bios your swap the chips over without powering off the system, it will overwrite the details on your chip and fix the issue. If you;re very lucky. If not, you will wreck both your and your friend's machine. So maybe not such a good idea after all.

My problem is solved! The problem was the slot! A friend of mine gave me a tip to give the memorychip a little extra press so i did and my computer is working just fine again! I put a little piece of rubber between the lid and memorychip and it seems to work! Maybe i need to clean the slot? But thanks anyway!

Should we presume that dell has poor manufactoring? Rubberband in the memory department sounds flawed.. ;)