Building a 9400 / M1710 laptop need help...

Hey guys im peicing together a Dell 9400 / XPS M1710 laptop. I bought the motherboard and it turns out the guy sent me an XPS m1710 board instead of the 9400. I guess he thought itwas a 9400 but it has the plastic LED connectors on it and it has that docking bay peice beneath it, although my 9400 base blocks it... i dont really ever intend on using it anyways.... oh well


Anyways i bought my 7900GS 1GB of ram, a 2.0Ghz Core Duo, a 17 WUXGA from a 9400... i got a good deal on everything pretty much.

So i install everything... i have base peice open and the palm rest is resting on the base peice i wanted to test it before i screwed everything in, so i plugged the power panel into the mobo and fired it up. The power turns on.... both fans spins on full speed, but NO lcd output!.... nothing. Then i cant turn the power off by pressing the power button i have to disconnect the power.

Anyone know anything on this? And is it normal for the chipset peice thats underneath the video card to read : SECRET ?

-steve

Yeah thanks for not rubbing it in too much. I like the special deals where i can get a good price on an item that the seller doesnt apreciate how much its worth... i got burned this time it seems. I never go the stable route... sometimes it pays off sometimes im stuck with crap.

Anyways yeah that doesnt bode well that the fans go on full tilt. The bios could be toast..... the weird thing was this unit was EXTREMELY fuked with. I mean the palm rest was cut in many places... most were delibrately over the fan inputs... like they were plugging wires into the fan inputs not actual fans..... also theirs a soldered wire going from an IC below the CPU to the fan connector... no idea what that is for. Also it has an extra led connector on it that i havnt seen on ANY m1710 boards....its called the JLMLED connector and its right nextto the power button connector. Its not the touchpad's led because that is below...

Also their are some screw posts missing. You know what im going to take a picture soon and upload it... i think even if i cant get this beast up and running we might be able to learn something..... i dont know what this board was for but it was for some heavy testing. I have another 2 boards incoming that are the same way....

I only paid around $100 each..... and the guy thought 2 of them were 9400 boards when they were M1710 boards so... i can probably just list them on egay, make a good auction and maybe get lucky and get more then i paid....

Brayton.... did you fully read my post? Its not a problem that i have an M1710 board.... its great! The problem is the board wont work. Im trying to get it to work now.... also i have a bunch of pictures ill be uploading soon. Theirs a little cutout on the underside of the cpu zif socket.... it looks like a place for a connector for something.... the board says

HAQ01 LA-2881P Rev 0.1 (M00) 2005-06-17


on the serial number part it says TRY

Well its not an GEN 2 mobo i gues technically it might be a GEN4 or 3..... theirs the GEN1 the GEN2 the m170 (is that GEN2.5?) then the M1710 which must be a GEN3. they are very similar so maybe their their all the same GEN2 with revisions... i dont know how they classify them.

Alright guys here are the pics.... i really think this is some kind of test board... i tried to plug into the DVI or HDTV or whatever that connection is next to the VGA. I already tried the VGA and that did'nt work. Well when i went to plug it in i noticed that the input was missing the 4 pins in a square shape on the right side. It has that little dash input in the middle but no pin inputs above or below the dash, strange. Also the base peices that they were in were almost a reference design, they all have spaces for the docking station even though only a few of the mobos have docking ports built into them.

Secondly theirs a few connectors ive never seen an IDEBG1 and an empty slot for an IDEBG2 connector. This board has an SATA interface so i dont know what exactly the ide is forbg1 connector is for. That was only on the 9400 board. The m1710 board has an extra led conector ive never seen, this is in addition to the speaker/fan/lcd panel/ and touchpad led connectors. Their was a fifth LED connector that said JLEMLED.

Their was also another connector on the power button strip that said JLOM i dont know if thats on all of them or what, it was on the power button strip which is attached to the palm rest. Now the palm rest was weird... all of them were 9400 series palm rests and they were cut up in all weird places... with lines of marker going along the cuts and measurements along the side of the length they cut written in marker. The touch pad removed on one... And their are specific cut out marks so they could access the fan connectors. Also if you look close under the CPU ZIF socket theirs a little wire that was soldered onto the 3rd pin of the fan connector and to a little SMSC chip, so i dont know whats going on with that.

I wish these damn motherboards worked! im so pissed... anyways any help would be much apreciated.