Laptop won't boot.

[Aksannyi]

I have an old-ish laptop that stopped booting about eight months ago. Basically what it would do when I hit the power button is I'd hear the fans start, it would whir for a few seconds, then cut back off. Then a few seconds later, it would attempt to boot again and go through the same process, in basically a never ending loop.

I'm not terribly invested in getting it to boot again - not going to lose sleep over it, I just kind of wonder if I can.

So today I pulled it out and figured I'd see if it would do anything. Not that giving it time would automatically fix the problem, but I was bored and I figured, what the hell. It's doing the same thing it did before. Now I'm not one for tinkering under the surface of electronics. I had to open it once - months before it started fucking up - to blow some canned air on it when it was making a terrible noise. That fixed the problem. Other than that, I've done nothing to mess with its inner workings.

The disk drive stopped working, and two of its USB ports also had stopped working. I was using the only one for my mouse at that point. I figured that was just due to age, probably not related.

Just wondering if there's anything you guys could suggest. I have no plans to take it anywhere to get it fixed because that shit costs money but if there's something anyone knows that I might be able to try then I'd be willing to fuck around with it and see if I can get it working.

I'd also love to retrieve some of the files on it, but it won't kill me if I can't.

[Isiolia]

Try it without a battery in it. Reseat the RAM and/or try it one DIMM at a time. Make sure other stuff is seated. I've seen things go haywire due to loose adapters on the back of optical drives (a common problem with the model, actually, thanks HP!).

It's very possible that it's a power circuitry issue, which would probably take a motherboard swap to fix.

I'd also love to retrieve some of the files on it, but it won't kill me if I can't.

You can get USB to IDE or SATA adapters for pretty cheap, which would give you an easy way to hook the drive up to another machine on a temporary basis. Convenient to have in general if you're troubleshooting or migrating between laptops.

Alternatively, you could get a 2.5" enclosure if you'd want to keep it hooked up on a more permanent basis.

[Aksannyi]

Oh, so I may have to actually tinker with the innards. What do I need to know not to fuck shit up? I mean it's already broken so meh but I'm sure I have the capacity to make it worse. XD

[Isiolia]

The main fear, usually, when dealing with the innards is static electricity. You can often find anti-static wrist straps in computer tool kits, some people have mats to put stuff on that are anti-static, that sort of thing. Realistically, you can probably just touch something metal to discharge static and be fine.

When handling things like RAM, expansion cards, etc, handle them by the edges if possible.