Hey all,
Have a second hand laptop i bought from someone who claimed its barely been used. Its on oldish side a dual core intel 1.8ghz with 2gb ram. Now i rarely used it and when i tried it other day, it would turn on. Plugged in charger/mains. Still wouldnt fire up. Basically pressing button to turn on some lights come on at boot, not the HD light however. I heard the cdrom and i *think* the actual laptop start...humming sound.Nothing comes up on the screen.
Im pretty good at troubleshooting desktops but laptops im all at sea with.
Any advice before i consign this to the not working pile anymore?.

Probably broken HD, but I'm not sure.

Call your priest and give it a proper burial.

No. If it was the HDD then it would still boot to the point where it asked for a bootable disk to be inserted. This is more fundamental. Something related to the battery. A loose power connection. Faulty motherboard. Something like that. Possibly the mobo battery has died. I don't know. I've never had that happen to me so I can't say for sure.

Do you have a cable that you could use to test your laptop hard drive on another computer? Perhaps your desktop? Just plug it up and see if you can pull files. Could be the boot sector / MBR or even actual hardware failure. If you can see the drive but not see files on it, try doing a repeated format or low-level one. If the drive is older, it's theoretically possible (though honestly not probable) that the magnetics have been thrown off a little and rewriting it several times could fix it. (Google: DBAN )
If you have a spare laptop hard drive laying about (doesn't everyone?) you could swap them out and see if it's a disk problem or something else.

It sounds like you're getting power to all the stuff you need. If you can pop open the case you could check the wiring from the power supply to the components. If everything looks good, it might be the motherboard. I've had two mobos die on me in the last three or four years in laptops, so it's certainly more common in my experience than desktop mobos. Said he heard the CDROM power up. It shouldn't ( "shouldn't" ) get power before the hard drive, so I'm thinking less battery, more wiring or board / disk failure.

Could have been the fan. But yes, a faulty connection somewhere is more likely. Screen doesn't come on.

Plug in an external screen and see if that says anything. Screen not showing anything is a sign that its backlight might have gone, but due to the other problems I doubt it's that.