Inspiron 8500 post issue.

[lithium726]

So, I've got a customer's computer here that I'm trying to figure out, and I figured someone might be a little more well versed with this particular model than I am, they were pretty popular back in the day. Basically, the laptop refuses to post 90% of the time. It will power on, no fans will spin, the caps, num, and scroll lock lights will come on with the power light and they will go right back out after about 5 seconds. If you hold your finger on the power button it will simply do this until the HDD LED powers on with the others and it actually boots. When he dropped it off with me, it would not load windows regularly when it did post, only go into safe mode. After taking the whole thing apart and reseating everything, on the rare occasion that it does post, it will boot completely into windows and as far as I can tell, operate completely normally. I have not seen the VGA fan spin once, and it does get rather hot.

I'm thinking dead video card or motherboard, some capacitor on either that is filtering improperly and not allowing the machine to post. If anyone is familiar with these machines and can tell me where to look I would really appreciate it.