Techie19

I have a Gateway 200ARC laptop that does not want to turn on. It went from working fine to not powering on at all. I tried with just the AC adapter, and nothing. I tried with both battery and AC adapter together, and nothing. And I also tried with just the battery, and again nothing.

When I connect the AC Adapter to the laptop, the battery LED turns on to a solid "green" which according to the manual it means that the battery is ok. This is the only sign of any life, besides that, the laptop doesnt do nothing else. When I press the "on" button, nothing happens.

Now, even the battery is no good, from my understanding, the laptop should still be able to work with just the AC adapter.

I have researched and came accross a couple of sites that claim that this can be do to the DC jack being no good, or not making good contact with the motherboard. So I went ahead and carefully took the laptop completely apart down to the motherboard to check that the DC jack was infact making good contact, and from what I saw, it looks to be ok.

Can it be the motherboard itself?

I love this laptop cause its light-weight, and easy to work with. So I want to try to get it working again.

The specs are:

1.4GHz Intel processor
Windows XP Professional
1GB DDR RAM
Wi-Fi
60GB 4,200RPM IDE HD
The motherboard part number is BA41-00353A

According to Gateway tech support, from the symptoms it shows that the motherboard is dead. They want me to ship it to them and it would cost me a total of $300 to get repaired, but that its not 100% for sure that its the motherboard.

Now, if it is the motherboard, I can just buy ti myself, and fix it myself. I checked and it cost about $150 at a website I found. I just want to be almost sure that its infact the mobo before I buy it.

Please guys, any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.