[NBLUG/talk] Laptop dying

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 04:55:06PM -0800, A'fish'ionado wrote:
> 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

Bad battery?  My laptop has a similar problem -- the battery will show a
full or near-full charge, and then spontaneously and catastrophically
discharge.  When I adjust the AC power cord and reboot, the battery
shows itself to be at zero capacity.

Yuck, and with a flaky AC adapter plug (probably the cause of the fried
battery in the first place), my laptop is a little scary to use right
now!

-troy (grateful for journaling filesystems and vim -r)