Inspiron All In One 2305 - No Video. MB tested good.

jaygpcrepair

Honorable
Jan 30, 2013
3
0
10,510
Hello everyone.

I have a dell inspiron all in one 2305 that would seemingly turn on when the power was pressed, you could hear a fan spin and a few very soft 'clicking' sounds and then nothing else would happen. Screen stays completely blank.

3 different stores told the owner that she needed a new motherboard.

Owner is a older lady, inside of machine looked practically brand new, so I dont think it was overheating or being treated improperly.

I sent off the motherboard to a motherboard repair service place and they called me back today and said the motherboard works fine. They said it outputted video fine and ran it for a few hours before calling me.

Im waiting for it to be shipped back so I can put it back together and try to solve the problem.

Googling this model of all in one will show you this is a very common problem, although no real common 'answer' is out there for it.

First thing I thought of was the lcd cable and/or inverter or back light. I dont want to spend money without trying to narrow down the issue.

Any advice for how to test the machine when I get the motherboard back? Im sorta at a loss to do on this one next and I do this sort of work everyday.

Thanks in advance for any help at all. Keep in mind Im just looking for ideas and stuff I cant physically test the motherboard for a few days until I get it back.
 

jaygpcrepair

Honorable
Jan 30, 2013
3
0
10,510
Ok thanks for the advice ill go try that too.

So i got the motherboard in the mail a few hours ago, hooked it all up.

Now the display seems to work, but does not bring up the post or bios yet.

It just does the color cycle test black white amber, then a row of rainbow boxes, then turns back to black.

The colors and lighting look 100% fine when it does this, so what am I looking at.. a bad converter?

If anyone thinks its the converter please speak up, the fact that it does the test assures me video cable is fine, and the motherboard, processor, ram, hard drive, has been tested OK.

Looks like it has to be converter right?
 

jaygpcrepair

Honorable
Jan 30, 2013
3
0
10,510
Hey figured id throw an update on here seeing how this machine is completely notorious for problems.

Messing around with it a bit more after hooking it all up I got the display to turn on. I was a bit cautious as to being relieved but I ran it all weekend about 50 hours straight with only a few problems.

The problems I had was if I used the touchscreen screen saver of an aquarium, it would eventually turn itself off/freeze. So I changed it to the basic mystify and it would run that screen saver all night long and be OK.

The other problem was once during a string of 30-40 windows updates it seemingly got 'stuck' on an update and began to overheat like crazy and froze. I opened it up, threw a fan on it and gave it a while and rebooted, installed the updates and it ran perfectly fine for another day straight, played a movie on it, surfed the web, etc.

I gave the desktop back to the owner and she used it for 10 days with no problems at all.

She called me a day ago and said it crashed in the middle of her talking on Yahoo Messenger and using the internet. I thought, here we go again, and going I am.

I got it to my office, turned it on, and the BIOS loaded up perfect, the windows 7 logo looked great, but as soon as the windows environment loaded, there were black lines across the entire screen distorting your view of everything, it was pretty bad.

I messed around with resolution, graphics settings etc, did a system restore to the day I gave it to her when it worked perfectly, nothing worked.

Safe mode, the computer looks perfect.. I go into regular boot mode and uninstall the Radeon Mobility 4200 driver, voila, the entire graphics glitch goes away, and everything performs perfect, I reboot several times to be sure, no problems.

I go online and find the most recent driver for this card, and the chipset, etc. I download and install the chipset then driver, and during the very last part of installing the driver the system froze, became partially unresponsive, began to overheat, I shut it down manually...

I let it cool off and go to turn it on, and the light above the power button blinks then turns and stays amber, the hard drive and fan spins, everything on the motherboard lights up, and there is no video action whatsoever, no light, no turning on, nothing.

EXACTLY how it was working the day she brought it to me.

What a nightmare, anyone with any advice Id love to hear it.

The insides are very simple, it has a motherboard, a 'inverter board', and your basic hard drive, ram, fan, touchscreen controller.

I have a brand new LCD video cable that runs from the screen to the motherboard in my mail tomorrow, and a brand new inverter board with new cable that will be here in a few days.

If neither of these solve my issue I can only think the actual LCD is going bad/failing.. but this seems to not be the case if you think about all of these issues I keep having.

I am posting this over at dell community also as suggested, but im sure this place is more active.

Thanks!
 

Sassysearcher

Reputable
Aug 7, 2015
1
0
4,510
jaygpcrepair ,

Did you ever find a solution to this issue? Was it the LCD? It sure sounds like it is software not hardware. Having the same issue and just wondered if you found a solution. It seems the mb could be bad, but from everything I have read on this issue, it doesn't make sense to be motherboard, as everything else works. Hope your still following this board ...

 


Unfortunately, it end up bad - straight to garbage, sold for parts, however, if you follow those recommendations, you could be in a better shape, read this.