Info - Dell Inspiron 1545 Power/Charging Problem

Mista_C

Not a question but I'm posting this should it be useful to anyone.

I had a customer drop in a Dell Inspiron 1545 the other day. It showed no signs of powering up nor would it charge the battery.
If I replaced the battery with a fully charged unit it would power up for a short while before swiftly dropping out (roughly 3 seconds to a minute).

I stripped the laptop to make a diagnosis. While doing so I cleaned it out, gave it a quick service and applied fresh thermal compound.
Before reassembling I tried powering it up running the bare essentials and boot up it did, right into Windows. I left it running like that for 20 minutes.

Thinking the problem may have been down to overheating I partly reassembled the laptop to check the battery was charging. I monitored the battery activity from CMOS and all indicators were it was charging correctly. I then completed the reassembly.

Once reassembled I attempted to power on, nothing. The battery was no longer charging.

Anyway, I eventually found the problem was the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard and everything has been working fine since.
The original keyboard showed no signs of a problem and was quite happily allowing me to select menu items, navigate CMOS and type into a Command Prompt. The was none of the usual indications of spillage and the customer confirmed nothing had been spilled on there (I've known this guy for well roughly 30 years and have no reason to doubt his word, he's very particular about care of his equipment oo-er :shocked: ).

I'm well aware the Inspiron 1545 keyboards are notorious for poor build quality but it's the first time I've seen a keyboard prevent the unit powering up or prevent the battery from charging.

Hopefully this might help someone else and save them a few quid at a repair shop.