Borked! Sadly, this did not work for my Dell Inspiron 1501. I've tried every way possible in every thread I could find using both a 4gb thumb drive, a 128mb thumb drive and a usb floppy drive. Only the 128mb thumb drive showed a steady led light on when plugged into the bottom side usb port (but sadly no flashing of the led indicating that it was reading anything). None of the key strokes did anything (END key, FN+END, FN+B, even no keys held, etc. etc.). Very disappointed in Dell for this. This from a frozen winflash when attempting to update the bios to 2.6.3 because the laptop suddenly did not like the battery anymore (though it was the same battery that came with the laptop...can someone say expiration date coded into the BIOS!?! ). So do I spend $150 off ebay for a motherboard, hope that it has the 2.6.3 bios? Or just say Eff Dell and buy a new laptop?
yea, I did. cd drive out, hdd out, both out, one stick of memory in either the a or b dimm slot, two 512mb sticks instead of two 1gb sticks, WIFI card out, I even tried it with the lcd screen disconnected. Nada, zilch...it's truly dead. For now, I crawl craigslist looking for someone selling one cheap with a broken LCD or HDD. I've found a few for $50, but never got any responses back. And just so you know, this was from doing a Dell factory bios update, not from a modded bios attempt or anything.
TQH, I appreciate your interest, but I think this one is somehow dead. For example, almost every dell thread I read they say that holding down END and plugging in the AC makes the laptop turn on and the battery light changes color. I don't get anything like that and the laptop does not turn on by itself. When I press the power button, the caps/num/scroll lights blink once and the power led lights and then that's it. I hear the fan briefly and it does spin the cdrom (if it's in). A usb floppy drive plugged into any port never gets accessed, same thing with a 4gb usb stick. I have a 128mb one that does light up the led, but it never blinks to indicate that it's being accessed. I've also tried about 10 phlash16.exe versions (I made up a dos batch file that let me drag and drop each one and it copied/renamed it to the USB drive). In truth, I have spent about 10-12 hours on this so far and if I were paying myself $10 an hour, I'd almost have a new mobo
This might sound strange but check to make sure that you don't have any antenna wires loose. I recently fixed an XPS M1530 that was locking up on bootup. It turned out that the WWAN antenna wires were shorting on the motherboard...a little electrical tape and all was fixed.