I was a replacing a friend's CPU on their laptop from a pentium to an i5. and now it doesn't boot up. a light turns on then it goes blank. I even swapped back his cpu and now it is doing the same thing. Can anyone tell me if it is possible to fry a laptop motherboard this way. Thanks!
I don't think you'd fry it, but I'm not sure the laptop could put forth enough power to get the I5 to work. It's just a theory, but did you use one of the mobile I5 parts? I'm just guessing that you used a mainstream one and thats why it didn't work. My only doubt in this is that it didn't boot with the pentium. So maybe you did fry it. I'd try resetting the cmos and then trying the pentium.
The other thing is the laptop likely would not have the instructions to run the i5. Like certain AM3+ motherboards could not run piledriver CPUs until a BIOS update. The board does not know what the CPU is and will not use it.
As for why it won't now run the pentium is an odd one. Did you check for burnt out pins on the motherboard after the i5 was taken out. It might have run too much power through it or connected to the wrong pins creating a short.
I guess you could fry it if the new CPU drawed enough power to damage the VRM's
I'm surprised the pentium and the i5 were the same socket. From what I understand it is possible if the board didn't have enough power. Reset the CMOS and pull the laptop battery and let it sit for 30 seconds while holding the power button down.
Also could we get the laptop brand/type/specs? That might help the rest of us figure something out.
Hp 2000 laptop with Windows 8 and it has 4gb ram with a 500 gb hdd