Laptop not turning on - help??

[penguinplease]

My just over 3 year old laptop has suddenly stopped turning on. Has anyone got any ideas on what might be wrong and how I can avoid paying a huge amount to get it sorted.. typically it has all my photos on it :( don't care about anything else but would like to salvage those. Last time I had a computer problem the person I took it too insisted nothing could be saved and wiped the lot & I'm not convinced he was very genuine (it wasn't this laptop).

Any advice appreciated

By not turning on, could you say what it DOES do, if anything?

Check that you have a powersupply plugged in. What lights (if any) do you get on the laptop? Does it make any noise of any kind? Does the display change at all, even if that means just changing from completely black to being black but with a backlight on (so nothing being displayed but the screen power is activated).

It really could be anything causing the problem. What have you tried doing - running just on battery, running on mains, running on mains but with no battery in the laptop?

If it isn't turning on, it sounds like the power supply is at fault, or possibly the battery.

Your photos are on the disc. Power supply problems won't affect your pictures.

Even if your laptop is no longer usable, the disc contents are probably retrievable.

Well it started off that the lights came on but nothing sort of kicked in and so it didn't fire up and now it is totally unresponsive.
It was fully charged and plugged in when it just failed and hasn't responded to anything since.

I haven't tried taking the battery out and running it just with mains but I can do that if thats worth a try.. ironically I was just about to move all the stuff that I wanted onto an externaly drive and delete it all off so that my daughter could have the laptop for Xmas.. foolishly thinking it would save money :(

That's definitely worth trying, very often when the battery goes it prevents the laptop booting up at all even if it is otherwise fine and plugged in - and if it is the battery, that's a reasonably cheap thing to replace.

Thank you, I'm off to try that now

Any idea what may have happened to it - got wet? Had a power surge? Been dropped?

Was it in standby, or anything like that... or do you always fully shut it down?
If you push and hold the power button down, does that then make any difference?

Can you get the drive out from it, buy a suitable external USB case and plug it into another computer running the same operating system? That is worth a try to see if you can pull data off the drive as soon as you can.

I've had laptops suffer a powersurge resulting in the laptop not working at all but the drive did spin when put in an external case... didn't last long though alas, it only produced data once. So depending what the damage is, you may get data off the drive, or you may not.