My laptop was dead and I, being god in my little computer world, resurrected it! As mentioned in the previous post it seemed like my Dell Inspiron 5150 suffered from a not-too-uncommon problem with an IC on the motherboard being loose. The C panel on the laptop has two supports of which one can reach the IC. After long-term pressure this pressure can destroy the IC. I.e. the soldering "breaks".

Having nothing to loose I bough a soldering iron on my way home from work yesterday. I took the laptop apart, completely! (was a bit careful about ESD) Battery, WLAN, memory modules, CD drive, display, keyboard, all coverings, and unscrewed the motherboard. Tipped the motherboard over and followed the suggestions given online. Gave each leg of the IC about 1 second of heat - it was visible that I had heated the connectors. Then I put it all together again. I removed the support on the C panel of course.

And now the laptop works again!!

The Inspiron 5150 is fairly old but it is my primary computer/laptop. We have been through a lot though, traveled through different countries, with Windows installed, for some time dual-boot with GNU/Linux and in the last few years running only GNU/Linux. We've also handled one HDD crash and a replacement. So I was not ready to give up just yet even though I had already looked at replacements in form of the Dell Mini 10.

And, as a plus .. the laptop is quiet again. I took the opportunity to clean the fan and cooling system from dust. The 5150 suffers a bit from heating issues that can be related to dust in the cooling systemthat builds up over time. There was a thick carpet of dust that I removed, and subsequently it is much more efficient, i.e. the fan does not need to work as much.