I think my laptop just died
- by Joel Coehoorn
I have a Dell 1330M that as of about 15 minutes ago will no longer POST.
What happened was I was working, stepped away for a moment, and when I came back it was turned off. I thought that was odd, but turned it on and things seemed fine. About 1/2 hour later it crashed and restarted, but came up fine again. It did this once more. At this point I was starting to get worried, but I hadn't had any problems with the laptop before and every crash was after doing some work in a virtual machine that I don't often use, so I at put the blame there. It didn't feel like it was overheating anywhere and there's no ozone smell of overheated electronics. Then it crashed a final time and now when I turn it on all I see is a bright screen with a bunch of vertical lines (noise).
I've tried removing the memory sticks one at a time, but I get the same result with either memory stick in either slot. With no memory at all it stops earlier in the POST process and the screen is completely blank (black, no backlight). As I type this, I hear a double beep from the system about once every 10 minutes.
I'm pretty sure the hard drive is fine because it fails during post, before anything off the drive is needed. The power supply seems good because the screen is nice and bright. It's not the RAM because swapping that around made no difference. The leaves motherboard (which I doubt and can replace) and CPU (which just might be changable). Any ideas? Is there any hope for this laptop? I'm rather fond of it and I'd have a hard time replacing it with anything near as nice.
