Broken Laptop

[brynndragon]

My laptop is misbehaving. It seems fine upon initial boot, but at some point the screen goes blank (it's not the screen, this happens with a regular monitor as well), the hard drive stops, and the computer ceases to respond. Sometimes it gets as far as the login screen, whereupon it flickers with each keystroke (like it has to think to figure out what to display in response to the keypress) and before I've managed to put in my entire password it goes blank. Occasionally after it's gone blank I convince it to show me something by hitting keys, and by something I mean the login screen but with trasnpositional errors (things no longer match up with each other, it's syncopated in the horizontal). Anyone have any idea what the frak is going on?

I'm really pissed off about this. It started happening after I got home last night from a day of playing WoW on it perfectly fine, and it came home in a padded-to-hell-and-gone laptop bag I just got, so I'm not sure how it could have sustained physical damage (if that's the problem). I even tried removing the new gig of RAM I'd put in it the day before, but that had no effect. It's got a 1-year parts and labor warranty, but I've had it for less than a month and it's already gone bad? The hell?

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

The wireless network it's been is password-protected and all networks it's on have been firewalled. I ran a full scan via AdAware, Spybot, and Norton2004 (after getting the most recent update for all of them) on Friday, caught a few things but nothing horribly evil. But virii/spyware is tricksy and I can't absolutely rule it out. I got an external case for the 180-gig HD that's in my desktop PC and haven't taken the OS off it yet, so I can take out the laptop's hard drive, plug in the 180-gig, and it should just boot and run (I'm fairly certain it can boot from the USB port, since it tries to boot from just about anything plugged into it). We'll see how that goes when I get home from work.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

That's a good sign. The only reason I asked is that it is possible for computers on a firwalled network to pick up strange things from other machines on the same network. Frequently LANs are less restrictive with machines within than they are with machine's outside (so if someone on one of your networks has been lax in updates and virus scanning you can potentially pick something up simply by going onto the LAN they use).

If you have trouble booting from the USB drive, one potentially simple way to test your system is to boot up from a Linux Live CD (or a bootable Windows CD). I've had to salvage data from many laptops that had dying hard drives and using one of those CDs is a great way that I've found for checking the system in general. The boot-up process tends to be very descriptive and if there is a problem with any of your other hardware the Live CD would pick it up and even if it failed and couldn't boot you can often see with exactly which component it had problems.