Two symptoms of a bad motherboard:

1.       Computer won't turn on 2. Components won't work

Number one, the laptop won't power on. Two, components in the laptop are not working malfunctioning.

Now, we are going with these symptoms one by one. There could be more symptoms but these are the ones that I've found in my experiences. Now number one, computer won't power on. We got a laptop, for example Dell Studio XPS 16  that doesn't power on. How can you tell if the motherboard is bad? Well, you just ask yourself why else wouldn't a computer power on? Number one, if it's on battery power, the battery is dead or the battery is bad and number two the AC adapter could be bad, so let's roll out number one.

Pull the battery(Dell Vostro 1000 Battery) out, keep the battery out of the computer for this test and then take your AC adapter and check the voltage with the voltmeter and I'm going show you how to do that right here. Take a voltmeter and what you want to test for is voltage. Put the meter at 20 volts DC and take the tip, the power jack tip. You hold your black, your negative on the outside of the tip and you put the red in the hole in the inside of the tip. Be very careful not to touch the red and the black and the tips together, otherwise it will create a short circuit. After doing these things, be sure you have 19 volts DC or just about 19 volts DC registered on your multimeter so we can know that the power adapter works. No laptop battery Dell Vostro 1310 Battery Now, just to make sure the connections is tight, kinda bend the power cord a little bit and make sure that the registered 19 volts DC on the multimeter or voltmeter will not fluctuate or move when you bend the power adapter cord a little. Okay if you're still getting 19 volts DC when bending the power adapter cord, jiggle the power adapter cord a little bit around make sure that there's no crimson wire. Now, after you bend the power adapter cord and jiggle it and you still have 19 volts registered on your multimeter, then the power adapter tip is probably good. A lot of time you know the tip will break, great in this area here, and you wouldn't get that 19 volts DC after you do that, after it's broken. So instead of just taking the whole computer apart and finding out if the laptop has appropriately good power jack, test the power adapter first. Now another reason a motherboard might not turned on is because it's not getting power to the power jack. Power jack might be damaged, so absorb what you can from the outside and see if it's the power jack is loose or detached from the motherboard and if it is then you know you have to replace the power jack probably, but if it looks like it's secure the only way we we're gonna be able to test the power jack is to get down to the motherboard level and look it where the power jack is soldered on to the motherboard and this I cover in many of the case study videos.

Watch the case study videos for power jack repairs on the link provided below.

Other things that may cause a laptop motherboard not to power on...

Now there's a few other things that might cause a motherboard not to turn on or computer not to turn on, it could have a bad processor, but bad processor are fairly rare I would say 1 out of 75 computers are working on, it's the processor rather than the motherboard that's bad and also there's like maybe the power button on the actual laptop is broken or something mechanical like that, but again that's unlikely but you could check those things too.

2. Components won't work

Okay number two, components on a laptop(Dell Vostro 1510 ) won't work. For example, a CD drive or a wireless card don't show up in windows. Whether not working properly, well that could possibly be a motherboard but the way to test that is to replace that component. If your CD drive is not working replace the CD drive if it's still not working maybe the CD drive controller or the motherboard is bad. I've had that happened on a couple Toshiba laptops I worked on. I've bought a brand new CD drive put it in, still not working, still wasn't recognized by the BIOS and it was a bad motherboard. Now HP, I also had a problem of their wireless card but it wasn't the wireless cards that were bad it was the actual controller on the motherboard, that controls the card that was bad. I think it was positioned next to a chip that got real hot like the graphics chip or something like that, on the motherboard. So if you have a laptop with components not working, you replace the components and they're still not working then you might have a bad motherboard. Now how do you roll out if windows isn't causing this problem or the operating system's not causing the problem. Well, test it with a different operating systems. This is always a good test of the motherboard using like Linux distribution like knoppix or using the Ultimate Boot CD for windows. These are both bootable CD's and it's essentially testing the hardware of a laptop because you're running it on a different operating systems. Last thing to try if components aren't working and you suspect is your motherboard. Flash the bios of the motherboard, maybe the BIOS got corrupted somehow, and since the BIOS is like handles the basic functions of a computer, maybe it's not doing it's job and causing some abnormal activity in the computer(Dell Inspiron Mini 9)