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Author Topic: My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!  (Read 590 times)

rickvoid

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My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!
« on: January 02, 2010, 07:58:00 pm »

My wife has a refurbished Dell Inspiron B120 that we bought her several years back.

Two months ago, it simply refused to turn on. At first I thought it was an outlet/non-charging battery issue, but testing killed that theory right away. I checked the fan, and smelled the system to make sure nothing had burned up. No smell. Self-assured that, at that point, nothing I could do could possibly make the situation worse, I unscrewed the back cover and removed the hard-drive.

Not sure why I did that, maybe I thought it would harm the computer somehow, and figured that if it was so intent on death, then it would die by my hand. Anyway, I put the hard-drive back in, flipped the sucker over, and pressed the power button.

It turned on.  ??? WTF.

The wife was pleased, and I made up some crap about logic errors and flushing the memory. She bought it, and my place as tech-god was once again assured.

Fast-foreward to today. This morning, I got a call from wifey telling me that her keyboard wasn't working. When I got home and had time to check it, the computer really wasn't receiving any input from the keyboard at all, and none of the lights were lit up. I checked the keyboard stuff in the control panel, where the system cheerfully informed me that the "device is working properly, boss". Bullshit. I tried to update the nine year-old drivers. Guess what? Apparently you can't improve perfection. No updates. I attempted to troubleshoot it. I'm never using that worthless troubleshooting program again.  >:( Finally, I tried plugging in a USB keyboard. That keyboard would work, but the built in one remained borked.

Left with no other option, I decided to try the hard drive again. Everything I know about computers tells me !!DO NOT TOUCH THE HARD-DRIVE, COMPUTERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!, but I figured, what the hell?

I didn't expect it to frigging work!!!

So, could anybody techy please explain, if possible, why the hell that worked? ???
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Akigagak

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Re: My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2010, 08:04:00 pm »

Don't all the drivers and other gubbins go in the hard drive? Maybe the connection betwixt hard drive and the rest of the machine is loose.
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But then, life was also easier when I was running around here pretending to be a man, so I guess I should just "man up" and get back to work.
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rickvoid

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Re: My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2010, 08:22:01 pm »

Don't all the drivers and other gubbins go in the hard drive? Maybe the connection betwixt hard drive and the rest of the machine is loose.

It felt like it was in there pretty solid, and I would have expected missing file issues if that was the case, something that hasn't popped up yet. Might be worth investigating though.
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Zironic

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Re: My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!
« Reply #3 on: January 02, 2010, 08:27:00 pm »

Just pretend to be Tech God for now, and next Christmas get her a new laptop.

It doesn't even have to be expensive to be decent now days. Thnx Moore
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LeoLeonardoIII

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Re: My Wife's Laptop is driving me STARK RAVING MAD!
« Reply #4 on: January 02, 2010, 08:32:48 pm »

Who really knows. Tell her to stop surfing pr0n and war3z websites ;)

(The ;) here is an emoticon that means I am joking when I say the thing that I said!)

Perhaps other things are routed through the HD assembly and pulling it out severs a connection that is remade when you put it back in.
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