[NBLUG/talk] Laptop dying

A'fish'ionado afishionado at gmail.com
Thu Jan 6 16:55:06 PST 2005


Argh! This last week my laptop has started dying on me at random times.

It's a Dell Inspiron 1000, dual-booting Windows XP and SuSE 9.0. I
bought it early last summer.

This last week, at random intervals, the screen will go black and the
HDD light will go on. The only thing I can do to make it respond is a
cold reboot. Sometimes, after that it won't even boot up again--the
BIOS splash screen won't show up--I just get a black screen and the
HDD light goes on. Normally, on boot the CD drive clicks as the BIOS
screen comes on--this doesn't happen. To make it boot, I have to pull
the power plug out for sixty seconds, then plug it back in and boot.

This has happened several times under both Linux and Win XP (mostly
under Linux, but then I mostly run under Linux, so that probably
doesn't mean anything), so I'm guessing this is a hardware problem.

Any ideas? I should probably just go call Dell tech support, but I
never know how the tech support people will respond when there's Linux
on the machine. :-P

William
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