Dell Vostro 3550 Troubleshooting

The laptop will not turn on when power button is pressed.

Make sure before trying to turn the Dell Vostro 3550 on again to plug the power cable into the charging port. Wait a minute and then try turning it on.

Take the battery out of the Dell Vostro 3550, hold down the power button for 1 minute, plug the battery back in. Screw the bottom back together and then try turning it on again.

Remove the CMOS battery in the computer and then put a new one in. This will make the computer go through a BIOS reset. Go into BIOS settings and make sure to fix the date and time settings. Press F2 repeatedly right after turning the laptop on in order to get to the BIOS settings.

The battery won’t charge when charging cable is connected.

Take out the battery, and then take out the old adapter by unscrewing it from the motherboard and then put a new one in. Then put the battery back into the Dell Vostro 3550 and hook it up to the new adapter.

Take the main battery out of the laptop. Drain the battery of its charge and then charge it again. Do these 3 times for better results. Make sure that the battery has time to cool between charging and discharging.

Remove the battery and then replace the battery with a new one. Replace the battery with this guide.

Device gets too hot and goes into overheating mode.

All the heat buildup in your laptop needs a place to escape, this is done by the vents on your device. Be sure that there isn’t any dust or debris buildup on the vents of your device. To remove any debris, use a compressed air duster to blow the vent you are trying to clean. Be sure not to blow the foreign particles into your device rather than out of it.

There could be excessive dust, food, or other foreign debris that have worked their way into the device fan, causing the fan to work harder than normal. This problem can be resolved by cleaning the fan with a compressed air duster. If the compressed air duster does not remove all of the debris from the fan, gently use a clean soft bristled brush to manually remove the particles.

Blue screen appears with a Windows error message and audible tone.

See troubleshooting step Overheating

Unplug hard drive and then put it back. If when running the test, it once again says that there is no hard drive found then it may need to be replaced.

First the access panel needs to be removed. Then remove one stick of RAM. Put it back and take out other stick of ram. If one is bad then the test where the one stick is in will fail and the other one will pass. If all tests are bad you need to replace all your RAM sticks.

First pop off the ring of plastic surrounding the screen. Once that is done, unscrew the screws keeping the monitor in place. Lean the screen forward onto the keypad, and remove the little bit of tape connecting the screen to the rest of the computer. Lift up the plug to disconnect the screen fully. Once that is done plug the new screen in and put the rest of the components back.

Lack of or no presence of audio.

After opened check the speaker icon on the lower right hand of the screen. After clicking on it make sure that the volume is turned up and that it is not muted which is signified by an x right after the icon.

Sometimes when opening applications there can be too much software running in the background in RAM. This might cause the audio to become jumpy or sound like static. An easy fix is to shut down and then restart and test to see if the audio is improved.

Simply take a can on compressed air and then blow any debris out of the audio ports. They are the small holes that earbuds or speakers could be hooked up to. Do not use any kind of liquid, even a damp cloth to clean the ports.

Remove the keyboard. After that remove the touch pad cable and the power cable. Once those cables are removed the entire top can be popped off. Slide the hard disk out. Take out the disk drive. Take off the motherboard. Unlock both speakers and unplug them. Then put the new speakers in. Plug them in and lock them. Then once that is done, put the rest of the components back.

Disk tray not opening when pressing the disk tray release button.

When the disk tray is closed harder than usual the release button will often get stuck in the pressed position. To bypass the release button, straighten out a paperclip and gently insert it into the small pin hole on the right side of the release button. When ¾” of the paperclip is inserted inside of the pin hole, you will come in contact with the disk tray’s latch. Carefully push the paperclip into the component and the disk tray will finally release.

Inside of every disk tray there is a latch that locks the tray in place when the tray is loaded into the computer. If this latch is broken, the disk tray will never be able to shut. By ejecting the disk tray and observing it from the underside of the computer, you will notice a small silver latch on the right side of the tray. To replace this latch, gently remove the screw located directly above the latch along with any screws fastening the underside plate of the tray to its frame. Carefully remove the latch and insert a replacement into the latch’s previous location. Refasten the underside plate of the tray back into the tray’s frame. The disk tray should now be able to close completely.