NP8886 will NOT start (utterly dead)

Hi, all,

When I got to my office this afternoon, my Sager NP8886, which heretofore has been a great, stable machine (except for some overheating/case melting near the heatsink) was off. "Hm...," thought I, "I wonder why it's off?".
Imagine my frustration when, upon pressing the power button, suddenly nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen, repeatedly.
I've changed outlets (usually run off of wall current) a couple of times. Each time, the green light on the power supply comes on, indicating at least SOME voltage and trickle current through the transformer. This is a good sign. Each time, nothing happens.
I took out the battery, unhooked the power, and pressed the start button for 20 seconds. Nothing.
I tried battery power only. Nothing.
AC power only. Nothing.
The CD player does not work.

Apparently, either someone played with the computer and didn't tell me about it (not very likely, but I won't totally rule it out) and screwed up the power system somehow (loose connection to the power button? Something else in that relatively short chain?), or there's some virus around which won't even allow one to start up the fans and get a "faulty OS" message of any sort.

My Dell laptop suffered some problem a little like this several years ago. From doing some hefty 'web searches, I found out that the keyboard can become staticy, somehow preventing the thing from starting at all. That was resolved by a little "reset" button, only reachable with a paperclip, just barely visible on the Dell. I've looked and looked, but this Sager seems to have no analogous reset switch.

Incidentally, I'm running Win2K, dual booting with a (very) rarely used Mandrake 9.1 partition.

Cheers, and I hope someone can help!

gardyloo

Some more info (but no help!)

I thought, "Hey, the transfomer may be getting the power into it, but what about out?" so I took a careful look at the bit of the power supply that plugs into the 'puter itself.

There's an outer ring (which I assume is grounded, or at least a floating-ground shield). Inside the ring are four pins, in a square shape. The lower two pins are also at ground, and the upper two give +20.33 VDC relative to the outer ring. This is all good. The upper pins were a bit corroded, as though they'd been shorted in the past, so I got out a screwdriver and cleaned them up nicely, making sure that everything was still +20.33VDC or 0VDC, compared to the outer ring, as it should be.

This made no difference to the Sager. Just sat there, dead.

Just thougt I'd throw that in there; it's not the fault of the power supply!

gardyloo

P.S. It's REALLY easy to short those pins to each other, or to the outer ring, when cleaning them or checking voltages, etc. The power supply seemed to handle those (very short) currents just fine, but be careful if you do analogous measurements!

Yup. Tried that

I tried (in addition to the battery out, power button scheme) taking the keyboard out (very easy!) and the CMOS battery (which tested at almost 3.1V) for a bit.

Nothin' doing. Still dead as... well, as a very dead thing. NO LEDS (I should have mentioned this before), no fans, no nuttin'. Luckily, I back up every other day on an external harddrive.

Thanks for the quick responses, all. I think that Sager will be getting an email/call pretty soon!

g'loo

What's happened so far...

Hi, just wanted to update the post so people might see how these things get resolved (or not!).

I called Philips (very nice, helpful) and they said they'd get micromedics (www.micromedics1.com) to send me a box to ship off the laptop. It didn't get there in any reasonable time, so I called them back (again, they were very helpful). They said that they'd tried to call me, but had the wrong phone number. Once that got cleared up, several days later, FedEx delivered TWO boxes to my door. Turns out that FedEx had taken the first one to my OLD address... Despite my having given Philips my new address, FedEx sent things to the old one... odd.

Anyway, packed the thing up (with power supply, etc.), filled out the attached form, and sent the thing from Kinko's (they've got FedEx Express shipping). The box got there (WA to Illinois? -- How did they choose MicroMedics?) in three days, rather than the advertised two, but that's OK.

Micromedics has a tracker online, which is kind of nice, since you can check what's going on. However, this hadn't been updated for several days (and micromedics' email is apparently not working: info@micromedics1.com, or the web-based form email thing), so I called the 800 number for micromedics, and talked to a rep. She was very nice and helpful, and was able to tell me that they'd diagnosed the problem: it's a bad motherboard! HOWEVER, they were NOT able to find a supplier for those parts!

So, if anyone happens to know the answer, it'd be great to see it posted: Where does Sager (or Clevo) get its parts, and how are they supposed to service these notebooks if no one supplies the motherboard? It seems to me that this would be a rather important thing to have on hand!

Hopefully, this will get resolved in the not-too-distant future. Everyone I've contacted has been extremely nice, if not totally efficient.

Cheers,
gardyloo

Ah, *ahem* a not-much-of-an-update

Wow, I hope Philips comes through on this one.

I called the repair company this morning, to see what's up. What's up is... nothing. As has been postulated in the previous posts, those parts (MOBO for the 8886) are not available any more, and everyone's waiting on Philips to make a decision as to what to do. I think I should probably call 'em this afternoon and hopefully get a "sure, we'll buy you several lappies of your choice! Are these palm fronds annoying? Would you like your grapes peeled?"

-gardyloo