HP Envy M6 - No power at all until sitting for months - then none again

[GeekWannabe]

First I am going to say I have limited knowledge when it comes to electronics..I am however decent at figuring things out via the internet..usually..sigh..lol

This is a laptop owned by my son in college and am hoping I can get it fixed for him..cheaply.

All I know of this laptop is that is an HP with a core i5 processor that after about a year and a half of normal use the thing would not get any power at all so he gave it to me to try and troubleshoot.

Symptoms are:
- no power at all including no l.e.d. when a/c is plugged in

Thus far Have tried:
- different a/c supplies
- multiple hard resets (unplugged with no battery held power button for a minute etc.)
- removing battery
- removing ram(s)
- turning wiggling or jiggling a/c plug at jack location
- several combinations of all the above

Heres THE wEIRD THING - and HOPEFULLLY A CLUe???
After giving up last time I put the laptop in a cupboard..it was sitting upright instead of laying down (in case that matters) for about two months. Then I got some time so thought I would try it again.

Well now it worked just fine..
As soon as I plugged in the a/c it got the orange l.e.d and powered on.
I left it on and decided to reset it to factory settings in case it was program related issue.
I had it on and used it with no problem for about 10 hours..even ran it on battery only for about two hours and battery held great charge.
Then I put it down and didn't plug it in...two days later plugged it in and UGH..back to same issue as before.

Tried all the same things as before...same result, no power, no l.e.d etc.

The laptop ran awesome for that one day..and now I don;t want to wait another two months to run it again...lol

Any ideas on the cause of this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

Actually you've done pretty much all the possible troubleshooting steps you can do to fix your laptop. I'm voting for a motherboard replacement already but here are some test you can do that may help as well.
- Try booting the laptop without the battery and see if it will load up normally.
- Next is to try booting up the laptop with just 1 RAM stick if it has 2. Do also try swapping their places into the RAM slots.
- Do also try another AC adapter that has the same voltage with yours.
- Another test would be removing the HDD and DVD drive and see if it will boot up or try booting it up without the DVD drive and just the HDD in it.

Hopefully this will help.

 

[GeekWannabe]

Thank you for the reply Laptop_Nerd, I wish I would have received an email notice that I got a reply..but glad I checked in none the less.

There has been an update to this issue...it once again worked after sitting for a few days.
I went through and did a ton of windows updates..did some HP updates and had restarted it several times during all of this. I ran it on battery alone and a/c..no issues.

I also disabled all sleep and hibernate so I could see if that was causing the issue.
So all was fine once again.

UNTIL...sigh..lol

I wanted to see about updating the BIOS when I came across the UEFI thing..never heard of that so went to have a look.

I found where the setting were on this laptop and as soon as I clicked on the last button to get into the settings of the UEFI...it locked up completely so I had to do a hard reboot. That's when it DIED once again...and now it sits, waiting for something to possibly drain?..or something to cool down? before it will most likely start again.

Any thoughts? I am wondering if the bios battery needs to be fully drained before it starts working again...I just don't know.

I did get in and run some hardware tests (that all passed) and was able to save a couple resource monitor files (cant remember what they are but contain all the stuff that's installed and hardware) so I have those files now..just don't know enough to begin to try reading them...lol

Thanks again for the reply..Also I tried all of what you suggested except the HDD and CD drive removals...I may do that next but am trying to avoid opening this up since it's never been open and I again am no tech...lol

Hi,

Actually you've done pretty much all the possible troubleshooting steps you can do to fix your laptop. I'm voting for a motherboard replacement already but here are some test you can do that may help as well.
- Try booting the laptop without the battery and see if it will load up normally.
- Next is to try booting up the laptop with just 1 RAM stick if it has 2. Do also try swapping their places into the RAM slots.
- Do also try another AC adapter that has the same voltage with yours.
- Another test would be removing the HDD and DVD drive and see if it will boot up or try booting it up without the DVD drive and just the HDD in it.

Hopefully this will help.