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Hi all. I got myself a cheap and cheerful second-hand laptop for a bit of old-school gaming and light admin from eBay. It's worked fine for about a week now however it wont power on. I've turned to Google and was able to reset the power supply to get it functioning a few times but now even that wont work. I'm pretty confident it's not the charger since I've tried two different ones and neither works. The only other possibility at the moment seems to be to try changing the battery, however as the laptop was very inexpensive to begin with and funds are seriously lacking at the moment I'd rather not spend out any more if it's going to be futile.

If it helps at all, it's a Packard Bell Easynote C-3 so pretty old, but it looked like it was going to do what I wanted it to.

I know there's not a lot to go on. The only thing I have noticed is when taking out and replacing the battery the battery light on the base flickers briefly, but apart from that there's no other sign of life. So any advice would be helpful at this stage, I'm not afraid of getting a set of screwdrivers and/or soldering iron and having a poke around at the internals if it might fix it, or should I just cut my losses at this stage?

If you turn the laptop on, do any of the lights flicker or burn?
If you put it on the charger, does the charging light burn?
If the charging light doesn't burn, it is not getting power, which probably indicates a faulty power supply unit or a faulty battery. If you are sure that at least one of the two chargers you tested is functional, then it might be the battery that has died.
If you remove the battery and connect the charger, will it turn on? A laptop should be able to function without battery if it has another source of power. If it still won't function then, it is most likely another issue.

I'm not sure what "reset the power supply" means in context to a laptop.

Battery can be so dead/malfunctioning on a laptop that it actually prevents it from starting. I haven't seen it often, but I have seen it. You can remove the battery and just run it off the AC adapter alone. It might complain a little, but it'd be fine.

Something we often saw with laptops back when I was working in service was that the power supply jack internal to the laptop breaks off of whatever board it's mounted on. This is usually a slow fail, but not always. You can check for that by plugging it in and then (gently) wiggling the plug around where it attaches to the laptop. If there's a lot of free wiggle there, then that's the problem. That's usually also expensive to get repaired unless you can do it yourself. And without meaning offense, if you're asking here, you probably can't.

Beyond that, general internal component failure is most likely, and a laptop of that age wouldn't be worth fixing even if you could find the parts.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
If you turn the laptop on, do any of the lights flicker or burn?

If you put it on the charger, does the charging light burn?
If the charging light doesn't burn, it is not getting power, which probably indicates a faulty power supply unit or a faulty battery. If you are sure that at least one of the two chargers you tested is functional, then it might be the battery that has died.
If you remove the battery and connect the charger, will it turn on? A laptop should be able to function without battery if it has another source of power. If it still won't function then, it is most likely another issue.

simonr1978 wrote:
Something that came up a few times via Google. Unplug and remove battery, hold down power button for a certain amount of time then replace the battery and charger. It was referred to at least once as resetting the power supply unit although I'm not entirely sure what it does, but it did seem to work the first couple of times.

It clears the stored charge from the capacitors.

A blown fuse or capacitor is the likely culprit IMO. They fuses are probably SMTs which are a huge pain in the ass to locate and then replace. A blown or leaking cap is a little easier since it will be visibly damaged. A replacement power jack is only about $4-5 on ebay, which is pretty cheap and easy. On the other hand $4-5 probably represents a sizeable percentage of the laptop's value, so I'd adjust my troubleshooting time accordingly.