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

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

A hard drive slowly crashing (e.g. one of IBM's Deathstars) could show all the symptoms she saw (including "horizontal syncopation"). I've seen at least a half dozen Deathstars alone go out with varying degrees of quickness and they've all had odd display issues upon boot up. Usually if it's the video card or some other component it gets caught during boot up tests and the machine gives some sort of error message/beeps and it rarely continues trying to boot up.

In my experience if a machine can make progress booting up towards the login screen then it's often the hard drive that's begun failing and the output you see will vary in strange ways as the data that the drive is attempting to access (while booting etc...) becomes increasingly corrupted and un-useable.

By the same token it's also possible for something else to corrupt the data in such a way that the machine can't progress to booting up properly.

If nothing else, the hard drive is potentially one of the easiest things to test for in the event that the warranty service isn't up to par. It's easy enough to boot from a bootable CD in order to bypass a questionable drive.