Alienware laptop no power

Alienware Laptop No Power troubleshooting steps that we did to find the issue:

  • first step we did here is perform a power drain, we did that by removing the battery and hold the power button for 30 seconds.
  • we plugged in the charger and checked for a lights and try to turn on the computer but that did not do anything.
  • removed the charger and again perform a power drain then plugged in the battery and tried turn on the Alienware but still no power.

after doing all of that we know that’s going to be hardware issue with either mainboard or the other laptop hardware.

steps we took to find which laptop hardware is having issue:

  1. we disconnected the following, screen, SSD/HDD, Wi-Fi chip then tried to turn it on but still laptop has no power.
  2. next, we check to make sure we have main power 19v or 16v and the 3V and 5v.  we had main power from the charger but there was not 3V or 5V.
Alienware laptop no power
Capacitor next to the RT284 caused the laptop not turn on because was shorted

alienware laptop wont turn repair steps:

  • we find first where does the 3v and 5v is coming from or which power supply is producing this power rail
  • after that, we check if both or one of those rails are shorted to ground.

after doing those 2 steps we found that Alienware not turning on issue was coming from shorted 5v rail to ground.

finding cause of 5v rail short to ground.

we were able to find the cause of the short by using our thermal camera and Appling 1v power to the 5v rail.  the issue was coming from Capacitor that was bad.

we removed the bad capacitor and replaced with working one, after doing that we tested for short and the short to ground on the 5v rail is gone.

we tested the laptop by plug in the computer to charger and checked for 3 and 5 volt rail and we did have them and were able to turn on the laptop.  this is how we got the Alienware laptop repair done.

fixing Laptop no power
thermal image showing the Capacitor getting hot after applying power.

what can i do to pervent laptop no power issue from happening?

there is a lot of things that you can do to prevent or minimize laptop no power issue

one thing to remember that when it comes to computer hardware’s there will be chance that it will fail even if you do the following steps but these steps will at least minimize the chance of no power or laptop not turn on issue from happing.

  1. do not leave the charger plugged in to the laptop all the time, you should unplug the charger when the battery is full or there is no need to charge the battery.  leaving the charger plugged in will heat components on the mainboard and reduce the life of your battery and mainboard components.
  2. turn of your laptop over night and let cool down, leaving on all the time will heat up hardware and logic board IC’s and capacitors
  3. keep food and liquid away from your laptop
  4. keep your laptop free of dust and make sure the cpu / gpu heat sink is clean and free of dust.