I'm sporting a Dell Inspiron 15 (M5030), the specs for which can be found here.
Over time I've made three upgrades to the laptop. I've installed:
- An Intel Advanced-N 6235, wifi+bluetooth 4.0 chip to replace the original
- An OCZ 128gb SSD in place of the primary 320gb HDD listed.
- A third-party battery (not a cheap one) replaced the original that had gone critical long before.
It is worth noting that the wifi chip does not work properly-- the bluetooth devices on the OS will READ as functional, but will not function and no amount of hacking around has made it work thus far.
The problem I have, among others, is that sometimes my laptop fails to POST sometimes. Or, it fail to get entirely through the BIOS to the boot process. I hit the power button, the screen turns on, and unpredictably, about 1/4th of the time, it stays black. I turn the laptop off and back on, and it will typically boot right in.
I installed the SSD just this weekend in the hopes of killing this problem, because I thought it might be the fault of the old hard drive. However, no such luck, and now I turn to you, the knowledgeable public, for help.
I can't remember if this all happened BEFORE I installed the wifi chip, but I don't even know if that would affect things in this way. I still have the old wifi chip, and I could install it to see if that would be the problem, if someone thinks it could cause such an issue. The failure is inconsistent but appears not to affect anything on the system's upper levels.
What do you think I might be able to do to determine the cause of this issue?
Thank you.