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?