Will some laptops not boot without the proper charger?

So, I'm the person who asked about that Compaq Presario 2500 laptop. Well, guess what I found at another garage (well, it was smack dab in the middle of our local copy/paste American city) sale? Another Compaq Presario laptop! This time a 2200. Compared to that sad socket 478 Pentium 4 and ATI northbridge based model, this one is build around intel's socket 479 Pentium/Celeron M platform. Now, my Dell Inspiron 700m is based on the exact same platform. That Dell doesn't get hot, so I had pretty good hope that this laptop hadn't baked itself to death. Well, the laptop doesn't work. Either this w

Question by qwerty keyboard on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.