ASUS K50IJ notebook problem dead or not?

I'll see if I can explain this as straight forward as possible.

Purchased ASUS K50IJ notebook about three years ago.
K50IJ - Notebooks & Ultrabooks - ASUS

Right off I swapped out the default 320 gig 5400 for a 500 gig 7200.
Loved the laptop. Used it for two years that way. No problems.

About a year ago I swapped out the HDD for an SSD.
Awesome laptop loved it even more. Again no problems.

Now a few days ago while in operation it froze. Could do nothing short of pulling the power cable and battery. Then it turned off of course.

Reattached the power cable and reinserted the battery and turned it back on.

The light in the power button turns on, the DVD does the usual zzp zzp as it always does when it's powered up. The power light at the front lights up. the HDD light flickers as usual but no logo on screen or anything on screen for that matter implying it's starting up.

Then all goes quiet and the HDD light pulsates very lightly like about every two seconds. but nothing on screen.

If I open the optical drive ( that still opens ) and insert a boot-able disk, it will spin up as if it's looking at the disk, does a few zzp zzp zzp and then just spins there for a long time but still nothing on the screen at all.

So a few things I've tried is:

Pulled the battery and power cable, then hold down the power button for a minimum 60 seconds. Then reattached just the power cable and pressed the power button. No change it helps nothing.

Opened it up and swapped out SSD for the original 320 tried again. Nothing on screen. Same as before.

Opened again and swapped out the cmos battery. Still no change.

It has 2 gigs ram built into the motherboard and two gigs added in an open slot. I pulled the add on ram stick. Still no change.

I connected it to an external monitor. Still no change .

This laptop stays mostly in my home and is used in my homegroup. No problems til this.

Sorry for the long post, but I was trying to explain what I've already tried so we don't repeat things. I hope I don't have to replace it but that's life I guess. Any insight from you guys is always appreciated.

Cheers! Beginning

Can you get into the BIOS settings?
On Asus laptops you repeatedly press the F2 key immediately after pressing power on.

Also, if you repeatedly press the ESC key at power on it should bring up the boot device menu, where you can choose to boot from the CD/DVD to test.

Tried both of those options, with or without an external monitor connected. No change, nothing at all comes up on screen implying it wants to start up. This one has got me completely bamboozled. Soon it's going to take flying lessons.

May? How to can I verify this?

Since you have already tried a reset (removing battery and PS and pressing the power button), and you cannot access BIOS, then this indicates a serious hardware problem.

Try this: remove the hard disk drive and try and start up. You will, of course, get no operating system, but you are trying to see if you can get into BIOS only.

You can also try reseating RAM modules.

Let us know what you find.

quote:
It has 2 gigs ram built into the motherboard and two gigs added in an open slot. I pulled the add on ram stick. Still no change.
end quote:

Will try starting with no disk drive as well......

Nothing........... Even if I have it connected to an external monitor just power connected not the battery. Even tried the ' hit the esc key repeatedly right after power on '. Funny thing, the HDD light is still pulsating like before even with no disk drive?

That could be the hard disk controller (guess). If it is it is still highly unusual.
Does that laptop have any out of the ordinary specs? Like a built in SSD or RAM Drive?

One last thing: the motherboard has a 3v battery. If you can get to it (requires disassembly) you can perform the exact same reset procedure, but this time removing the 3v battery along with the laptop battery and power supply. That will perform a hard reset. If that doesn't change anything then you may be looking at a defective motherboard.