Drew Wilson
October 22nd, 2009, 02:48 PM
Laptop
Dell Inspiron 1525
Windows Vista
I've been having some rather scary issues with my laptop over the last two days.
First issue happened yesterday when, for the second time, my laptop said that my laptop was plugged in, but the battery was not charging. After Google searching the issue, it turns out that this was a common problem with this particular line of laptops at least. I found one set of instructions and went into BIOS to see if it's just not reading the charge. The BIOS said that my laptop battery was idol and it was an unknown AC converter.
The advice was that if you saw this, not only was the plug-in being rendered inoperable, but also the connector on the motherboard. You'd effectively have to replace the whole motherboard (aka, get a new computer from the sounds of things)
Since it's just a power issue and I'm close to plug-ins in most circumstances, I figured I could handle this issue for a while all the way up to the end of the semester so I could just simply buy a new laptop during the Christmas holidays.
Then today, I had my laptop just sitting there on my desk in the middle of a lecture and it bluescreened. This is quite common as Vista is quite unstable anyway, but it took the unusual step of booting back up on it's own (I normally have to manually turn it back on)
What happened next scared the crap out of me. It said that the hard drive failed to read and to check to make sure that the drive is sitting correctly, press F1 to try again. After hitting F1, it just repeated what was said.
I then did a hardware shut down, then turned it back on. After Vista complaining I wasn't shut down properly, the computer ran normally.
I've never gotten this error before and since both issues struck one day after the next, I'm wondering if it's just the motherboard starting to fail or if it's a sign of a total hardware failure and it's just waiting to just die perminently at this point.
Either way, I wasn't screwing around once I got a normal boot and backed up every project file I had thanks to a very handy USB stick I had on hand (everything else is replaceable at this point).
So I'm wondering, does this sound like a sign of immenant death of my laptop or is it just an unusual bug that happened? Also, should I consider buying a new laptop if I want to keep using one real soon because of this issue?
I spoke to someone about this already and the suggestion was that when I get a hard drive error like this, it means that the disk is wobbling, but I know I havn't dropped this thing in a very long time (re: over a year) so if the issue was going to happen, I would have thought the issue would be within a month after any sort of impact like that, not over a year later.
Dell Inspiron 1525
Windows Vista
I've been having some rather scary issues with my laptop over the last two days.
First issue happened yesterday when, for the second time, my laptop said that my laptop was plugged in, but the battery was not charging. After Google searching the issue, it turns out that this was a common problem with this particular line of laptops at least. I found one set of instructions and went into BIOS to see if it's just not reading the charge. The BIOS said that my laptop battery was idol and it was an unknown AC converter.
The advice was that if you saw this, not only was the plug-in being rendered inoperable, but also the connector on the motherboard. You'd effectively have to replace the whole motherboard (aka, get a new computer from the sounds of things)
Since it's just a power issue and I'm close to plug-ins in most circumstances, I figured I could handle this issue for a while all the way up to the end of the semester so I could just simply buy a new laptop during the Christmas holidays.
Then today, I had my laptop just sitting there on my desk in the middle of a lecture and it bluescreened. This is quite common as Vista is quite unstable anyway, but it took the unusual step of booting back up on it's own (I normally have to manually turn it back on)
What happened next scared the crap out of me. It said that the hard drive failed to read and to check to make sure that the drive is sitting correctly, press F1 to try again. After hitting F1, it just repeated what was said.
I then did a hardware shut down, then turned it back on. After Vista complaining I wasn't shut down properly, the computer ran normally.
I've never gotten this error before and since both issues struck one day after the next, I'm wondering if it's just the motherboard starting to fail or if it's a sign of a total hardware failure and it's just waiting to just die perminently at this point.
Either way, I wasn't screwing around once I got a normal boot and backed up every project file I had thanks to a very handy USB stick I had on hand (everything else is replaceable at this point).
So I'm wondering, does this sound like a sign of immenant death of my laptop or is it just an unusual bug that happened? Also, should I consider buying a new laptop if I want to keep using one real soon because of this issue?
I spoke to someone about this already and the suggestion was that when I get a hard drive error like this, it means that the disk is wobbling, but I know I havn't dropped this thing in a very long time (re: over a year) so if the issue was going to happen, I would have thought the issue would be within a month after any sort of impact like that, not over a year later.