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

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

I had something similar happen to my laptop; I figured it was some kind of thermal stress. I'd boot up and it would be fine for a while, then start getting progressively flakier. When I'd use one of those USB-powered laptop coolers I'd get more runtime before things went south... a sure sign.

Fortunately my laptop was still under warranty, so I just sent it back and they switched out the motherboard and everyone's happy now. I also now check to make sure it's not running before I stuff it in the backpack ;)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I thought of the possibility of thermal troubles myself, so I left it entirely off (not merely hibernating or whatnot) overnight and tried it again this morning. There was no observable difference, and it was pretty cold in the living room since we generally leave the thermostat set to 55 and only turn it up when we're actually in there. So I'm guessing it's not a thermal issue (too bad, the fix would've been relatively simple ;P).