June 30, 2006 at 8:12PM My laptop is borked.
It just hung.
I don’t know why it hung when it did, but it did. I sat down in the living room to check my mail and read my Bloglines subscriptions. And it hung.
Actually, it wasn’t quite like that. It was more like as if it--a Latitude D510--had decided to run at 4MHz instead. The trackpad and keyboard were unresponsive and Firefox’s spinner was caught in mid-spin. Hitting the power button made it jump back to life for a moment or two, but that’s about it.
I left it for five minutes to see if it’d just hung temporarily. These things happen, after all. That didn’t help. I removed the battery and cut the power from the mains.
Again, I left it for a minute and went off to make some coffee. I came back, switched it on, but it made a clicking sound, like as if the harddrive was starting up and shutting down, and it turned itself off.
This is when I got worried. We’re talking here about an eight-month-old laptop here. This shouldn’t happen.
I came back to it a little later and it started up ok. For safety’s sake, I started it up in safe mode and ran diagnostics on the harddrive. It checked out ok, which is good. But then the keyboard and trackpad became unresponsive again, though the machine was still plainly still operating. I grabbed my USB keyboard and plugged it in. That worked fine, but my USB mouse didn’t work at all when I tried it. I rebooted the machine and started working on it again.
It was fine for a short while, and then it hung again. This time, nothing worked at all, so I cut the power. I came back an hour later, and it still wouldn’t start up. It starts for half-a-second and then shuts itself down again. ![[cry]](/images/smilies/cry.gif){kind=small}
To be frank, I’m at my wit’s end with it. I suspect the problem lies with one of the bus, the processor, or memory. My money’s on a memory fault.
In the mean time, I can still use my parents’ machine, a crappy old IBM running Windows 98. I’ll have to get the warranty details from the US and send it off to Dell. If they wipe replace the harddrive, I’ll kill somebody.
Why am I posting this up?
There’s stuff I’m working on currently that I do not have a backup of. Seeing as I haven’t done a backup for the past two month’s and this computer only has a CD-R/W and can’t read DVDs (which is what my backups were made to), pretty much all my data is off limits to me right now.
That’s a lot of data, and a lot of code, and a lot of spreadsheets containing billable hours that need to be paid to me.
I don’t know what I’m going to do in the mean time, but as you can imagine, I’m a little depressed. If anybody out there could help me in any way, or has any idea of how to fix it without having to give it to Dell for who knows how long, I’d very appreciative.
1 On June 30, 2006 at 23:54, Topper wrote:
Try scraping off the dried-in cum-shots :p
No seriously, a few good kicks will bring her right back into life; you’ve laptop is your bitch.
Seriously this time, just drop it in to a repair shop to get the data - its easy enough. My buddy Finbarr has the gear to retrieve the data if your stuck. Do ye have computer repair shops in Sligo?
PS. I’m going to Boston for a month next Thursday so if your over there during the month, make sure to let me know and we’ll go get some prostitutes or something.
2 On July 1, 2006 at 0:00, Daniel wrote:
Hi Keith,
It sounds to me like a problem with the cooling. Is the fan still working? When the temperature gets high, those sympthoms happen.
Maybe if you use it in the freezer :-)
Dan.
3 On July 1, 2006 at 2:52, Keith wrote:
If fixing it was only as easy as a few wallops, I’d’ve done it already.![[smile]](/images/smilies/smile.gif)
A cooling problem occurred to me as the model is known to have a bit of a problem with overheating (and my lap concurs!), so I downloaded this tool in one of the moments where the machine actually worked for a while. The fan was working anyway, but I figured the extra cooling couldn’t hurt. It hung anyway.![[sad]](/images/smilies/sad.gif)
I could always go the oil route...