My megahurtz have been stoled :(
So my laptop has been acting up for a long time, randomly restarting (and a long time is like maybe even a year), but I worked out what was causing it. Any kind of pressure around the CD drive caused the laptop to lose power (no idea why). So I have managed to use my laptop quite happily for a very long time by avoiding the CD drive. Worked pretty well, it’s not like I couldn’t use the CD drive, it worked fine. Just leaning my hand on that side of the keyboard could do it.
But last week my laptop died completely, just wouldn’t turn on one morning. I am assuming this was a completely different problem. Anyways, it sat there few a few days until I could be bothered to go to the Dell website and try get it picked up and repaired (still under warranty). However, like they do, they get you to troubleshoot it cause they are lazy, but in all fairness, people are stupid so most of the time it probably isn’t broken. Anyways, I think, might as well give it a fair chance and I go into the troubleshoot guide that describes my problem the best (no power). I have to admit the Dell interactive troubleshooting guides are pretty good. I followed the procedure (even though most of the time I knew it would fail) to test the laptop on AC and battery totally independant from one another while removing some of the different modules (since everything is pretty much unpluggable on Dell laptops). Eventually I have everything unplugged except the keyboard and have tested battery and AC, and I am at the end of the troubleshooting guide. So content that the tech support guy won’t be able to catch me out when they contact me, I start putting things back in… first goes in the battery.
Ok, I’d like to remind everyone that I had already tested the battery numerous times with different modules plugged in/unplugged and there was no signs of activity at all, and this includes when all modules were removed at the same time. So why the hell did my motherboard burst into FLAMES when I plugged the battery in this time!? At the time, the laptop was upside down with all the covers and modules off/out and underneath where the RAM should have been, right next to the battery connector… phwoomph! A chip goes supernova on me. Now my room smells of sizzling silicon.
In the tech support descriptions I put in the original problem and there’s a part that asks you what troubleshooting you have tried, so I mentioned I followed the appropriate troubleshooting guide and it made things worse :/
I’m not too bothered really, it really needed to get returned at some point and now I’m in new house, settled in for a long time, I can without worry of where my laptop will be returned too. Only bugger is that I have data on it that I will need to retrieve, I guess I will ask Ben if I can hijack his laptop to do it.
…fun evening, guess I’m going to bed now.
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By Jester, September 13, 2006 @ 5:14 am
Least you’ve got a flame thrower now…
I don’t suppose it’s one of the batteries that were recalled as a fire hazard…?
Eithercase, glad your room is only smelling of sizzling silicon…
By Benji-kun, September 13, 2006 @ 9:54 am
The short answer to hijacking my laptop would be:
No
The long answer would be:
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo
And the real answer would be sure – I assume you want my old Ubuntu one? Just try not to break it any more than it already is
By Jester, September 14, 2006 @ 2:32 am
Ubuntu? Broken? Blasphemy! :p
By Thistle, September 14, 2006 @ 8:05 am
All your laptops are belong to Jargon. :}