Are these problems symptoms of a broken motherboard?

Question

I've got a Latitude E5500 That has been apparently been sitting in a box for a few years.

Lady gave it to me, said it would never boot up. As I suspected, the bios battery was dead. I yoinked it out and it started right up. I told her I would get her another battery and sort out some other stuff on the computer.

I booted it in safe mode, and left it running for a bit. When I came back, it was dead. Turned it back on and this time it died shortly after start up.

There is a blinking combo that in the user manual says it means the processor is dead. Okay fine, an extra $20, no worries. So I swapped the old intel core 2 duo for another and I got the same error combo. I then put the old IC2D in to a laptop I know works, that booted fine.

What happened to the Lattitude? Could the motherboard be dead?

Answer 1

You need to run the Dell on-board diagnostics. If you can keep the laptop booted up long enough, run the diagnostics by pressing F12 at the BIOS splash screen, then choose the Diagnostics startup option. The diagnostics will test the CPU, motherboard, memory, and other critical components of the laptop.

After running an initial diagnostics test, taking perhaps 10-15 minutes, you may be offered to run an Extended diagnostics. Do so, especially if the short test doesn't turn up any errors.

If the Extended diagnostics don't find anything, look for an option to run tests on the motherboard, CPU, memory, etc. multiple times. This will help you catch intermittent problems that might not be discovered by running the diagnostics only once.