Inspirion 8000 will not post, powers on, blinks rapidly, powers off

Hello,
I purchased this laptop used and non-working. The laptop is an Inspiron 8000, 900mhz P3, ATI graphics card. So far I have tried:

-Switching memory sockets
-Different, confirmed working memory sticks
-No memory at all
-Removed everything (hd, batteries, cdrom, etc.)
-Removed screen, pulled MB, nothing obviously wrong
-Different AC adapters
-Different batteries
-Tried insulting the bottom of the cpu socket (as seen in a dell forum thread)

And still, I cannot get the laptop to post. It powers on, the scren flickers, and the HD light and the three lock keys blink ~10 times rapidly, and then the unit powers itself off.

Any ideas what it might be? The only thing I can think of, is Video card, CPU or MB being bad. Would it be worth it to pull the system battery to try and reset the cmos? Any other ideas? Thanks for the help!

- David

 

So upon further inspection today, and I think the Battery Charger Board is actually bad. The large roundish thing, as seen circled here: http://www.davidschick.com/dcboard.jpg looks to be broken.

When I remove the Battery Charger Board (also called DC Board), the computer will not turn on at all. Even with everything removed, but DC board, it will still turn on and complain.

I'm going to try to order a new one from ebay, and see if that fixes the problem.