R51 running Vista, won't boot

[larrytuttle]

Here are the symptoms.

Last few days:
Screen goes blank at random times, mostly withing 2-10 minutes after booting. When it goes blank, the disk activity light stays on.

Holding the power button down for 10 secs and then rebooting worked once in a while, not every time. I got into the BIOS and changed the boot order to boot from the Hard drive first. And I disabled hibernate and sleep and lid button and the screen saver. I installed a display driver upgrade. I reassembled the box after reseating all the connectors/cables I could find. This seemed to work as it did not go blank for 24 hours.

Today:
Now it does nothing. When I hit the power button, the fan comes and the disk activity light comes on and stays on. When I unplug the CD Rom drive, the disk activity light goes out. I removed the hard drive. No impact. I switched RAM. No impact. I unplugged the Bios battery. No impact.

My guess its the mother board and the box is toast.

Any ideas.

Thanks.

[ZaZ]

Maybe try a Linux live CD to see if it works that way. It would tell you if it's a hardware or software issue.