Tuesday, November 09, 2004

I hate it when technology wears out!

Well, I'm more than mildly miffed at my dumb laptop computer!

Its a Dell Latitude CPxJ. I had Win2K running on it for about 8 months. Then suddenly, the dumb thing started blue screening on me. I was able to salvage most of my files, then tried a new fresh install (including reformatting the disk) - but to no avail. I next tried to install linux, but everytime I try to boot, the kernel panics! I'm afraid that it means either a hard disk failure or memory problem. It may even be on the motherboard.

Either way, I'm terribly unhappy about it, because now I need to spend $35 for a diagnostic test over at Discount Electronics that is only going to tell me to spend a lot of money to fix it.

On top of all this, my SMC Barricade router is beginning to get a little flakey. It continues to let the Lan work correctly, but it loses its connectivity to the internet, and has to have a warm reset done on it in order to regain connectivity. I hate it when technology wears out!

5 Comments:

At 11:23 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe you'll be lucky and it will be just a bad memory stick... Is it still under warranty?

One of my two Linux servers is going south, too - I have mirrored IDE drives and am getting a disk controller failure on one of them. Fortunately a Fry's Electronics is opening up nearby - I am going to get another motherboard for cheap and simply transfer the CPU and memory... I think...

You might see if the router has any firmware upgrades available on SMC's website.

Good luck!

 
At 11:23 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

(Oops - forgot to sign the above post)
- Nat

 
At 11:35 AM , Blogger The Cat said...

Well, not as bad as it could've been. Turns out the board that is responsible for charging the battery was running excessively hot. They replaced it for $20 (plus the $35 diagnostic), and then told me the memory had a serious problem too (1-256MB stick). So I went ahead and replaced/upgraded the memory to 512MB (2-256MB sticks)($160). [grimace] I'm guessing that the charging board, that sits directly over the memory, baked the memory. [I thought it had started running hot a few months ago.] The moral to the story is, When a laptop starts running hot, FIX IT!

I threw Fedora Core onto the machine, and it is running well now - though TUX Racer still runs like a dog (though I have to admit Tux is moving faster than I have ever seen him move before). I'm running on a Latitude CPxJ(P3 - 750Mhz) I wonder whether it has something to do with video memory?

 
At 7:09 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

*grin* I doubt it's the video memory, more likely that X is not configured to support it well or something, but that's a SWAG. If you are running gnome, you might have a little icon inthe bottom right where you can adjust your resolution on the fly - if so, try 800x600 and see if the game is faster.

Good to hear it's running better! I've taken to running on AC power when I can, just because my lap gets too hot when running on battery. (Might not be a problem in winter...) On the other hand, I'm no longer safe from the two seconds power losses that we get every now and then...

- Nat

 
At 7:11 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Clarification - running on AC power with the battery REMOVED...

- Nat

 

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