I had this PackardBell Easynote TK83-SB for a while.
When i got it the laptop did power up but would only display a single "
_" at the top left corner and power cycle after half a minute or so.
On the
rare occasion it would display a few error messages and
stop power cycling, pressing anything would result in a loud beep and a copy of the same error messages to appear.
I googled one of the error messages and it said that it tried booting to LAN.
Then i found that the main CPU chipset was in fact blown, a burned trace could be seen on the BGA going straight to the silicon chip.
I ordered a used chipset from eBay for 5 bucks, i reckoned chipsets don't fail that often, a used one should be fine, plus this one came with the balls already on.
I guess i took a gamble and lost because after the chipset replacement the laptop does not power on anymore.
When i press the power button the fan goes whoosh for a few seconds and then happens what appears to be a rather violent shut-down, maybe indicating an over current protection ?
The time between power-on and shut-off is about the same as what would be the time between power-on and display-on previously.
Also worth taking note is that before with the blown chipset, with a single 2GB ram stick it would do as mentioned above but with a single 4GB ram stick, instead of the 2GB one, it would show absolutely no signs of life ( no fan spin, no lights - nothing ).
While on with the old chipset it would get rather hot, considering it was just sitting there doing nothing.
And also the heatsink had a carpet of dust on it, so the original source of the issue was overheating, WASD area under the heyboard shows no signs of abuse so the laptop was not used for gaming.
Cleaning the heatsink was the first thing i did when i got the laptop.
Even with a defective chipset i expected it to do more than to hard shut-down after a few seconds of power-on, makes me think what else could be bad on that board.
Edit: pics are up.