Gateway M350WVN Won't Boot...Help Please

I just picked up a M350WVN from my friends sister.

It went down on her and she had me remove the hard drive and put it in an external enclosure for her.
In return she gave me her broken Gateway since she picked up a new Thinkpad.

Here's the low down. I will try to be as concise as possible to hopefully give you guys a better idea of all the symptoms.

First the AC adapter is OEM, it has the light at the end glowing green and tests fine @ 19V.....

Plug the computer in with the battery connected and the yellow charging light illuminates....

Press power button.....

Green Power light comes on next to the yellow charging light for 1 second. Then both lights go out......

Now here's the weird part..... A cyclic clicking sound is heard from the power input area.....it's to soft and low to be a fan I think....It doesn't sound like power arcing...too cyclic in nature....

This noise persists until the cord is unplugged....

or the reset button on the bottom of the case is pushed....

So I take off the battery and test it without it.

Before repowering I held down the power button to discharge any power from any caps. I also used the hard reset switch on the bottom just to be sure.

So I plug in with out the battery attached...No Charging light this time of course : )

Hit the power button...Green power light comes on...turns off and that sounds happens again until it's unplugged....It coming from the area of the usb ports/upper right keyboard trim bezel charger area.... it's almost like dragonfly wings flapping as crazy as that sounds.....

So when you reattach the battery and plug it back in the charging light comes on.....Then power the laptop back on the power light comes on for one sec. Both lights go out, I hear the drive spin half a revolution maybe, and then nothing no sound at all....

Hit the power button again and then lights flash again go out after 1 sec. and the noise is back again.....until unplugged.....

So to recap.... The power supply is good....

The unit won't charge a battery because it won't do anything when disconnected from AC....

But the unit exhibits that strange behavior of making the hard drive spin for a second and not making that strange noise for the first power up attempt after reseating the battery. Then when power is pressed a second time the clicking noise comes back again.

So where am I at here guys?

I know alot of threads about this mention the solder points on the DC jack....

Would I get a charging light if the jack was bad?

Could it just be a bad ground? so it sends power to the charging LED but once you try and turn it on it detects that it's not connected properly and it shorts out ?

So far I have reseated and tested both sticks of memory, reset the machine via the recessed button on the back. Re seated and tested with and with out the battery... I also reseated a small rechargeable battery that looked to be CMOS but smaller than normal under the keyboard.

And it's still doing the same thing.....

And What is that noise I'm hearing? It's not the case fans..their not spinning. this to quite to be the CPU fan.....

Any help is greatly appreciated !

TIA,

-Alex

A bad power adapter ??

I tested the voltage and amperage.

It's exactly to the specs of the power adapter.....

There is a green LED at the end of the adapter cord, That's lit up.

The pins are in fine condition.

And yes the first thing I did when it wouldn't boot up was wiggle the plug gently.

The charging light on the laptop stays on and so does the status light on the end of the adapter plug.... Any which way I move it the connection is not lost... all lights stay illuminated....Showing there is power flow into the unit.

Any other suggestions?