At home, I have a perfectly good laptop that is sitting unused. This is because about two months ago the battery stopped recharging. Click here for a brief history of that saga.

Yesterday, the motherboard I purchased off of eBay arrived. Last night, I eagerly installed it. You know, I was really afraid while I was taking it apart that it would be impossible to put back together. In the end, it wasn't that hard. (Except I have two extra screws left over and I don't know where they go. Oops.)

So after I put all of the parts back in, made sure everything was secure. Plugged the laptop back into the wall, and attempted to power up.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Put the battery in, it boots up fine but the battery doesn't recharge. Take the battery out, and no power.

So it turned out to not be the motherboard. What else can it be? The two other suspects are the power cord, and the battery. The power cord costs less than $10. I've ordered one off of eBay, and it will take another week or two for that to arrive. New laptop batteries run around $100, and I would have to think twice before trying that option.

Well, now I have an extra perfectly good motherboard. What I'm going to do is take the new one out and put the old one back in, and sell the one I just received yesterday on eBay. Maybe I'll take that money and put it towards a battery if it comes to that.

There is a lesson in here somewhere. I should have tried replacing the $5 part first, and then replaced the $70 part if that didn't work, EVEN IF the $70 part was the most likely culprit. I am so used to doing things in order from most likely to least likely, I forget to take cost into the equation.

Update: The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 7000, circa 1998, in case other people are searching the web for information on the possible causes of this problem.