Am I Nearing Total Hardware Failure?

[Drew Wilson]

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.

[w31n3r]

similar thing happened to me once on my desktop. shat my pants when i got the HDD error, i had over 400gigs of good porn i didn't want to lose. turned out the drive was ok, but i think it was the sata controllers that was fuxored, don't recall exactly.

so it looks like you may have a motherboard problem. if your current laptop suits all your needs, don't really see a need to go and buy a new laptop...just send it in for repair. unless of course cash is easy to come by. replacing the motherboard will be (far) cheaper, and most independent service centers should do it within the same day.

[Drew Wilson]

Ahh, I had a screen that went bad on my first laptop and the cost was, well, may as well replace the laptop. I figured the deal would be the same for a motherboard. Interesting.

[don webb]

.

Not an expert like some of you but my lap top did pretty much the same.

Of course it was an HP which sucked to begin with but they wanted to replace the HD at allmost the cost of a new one?

I gave it to my son, he got into the inner workings cleaned it up a bit, that fixed it and he has been using it since with out any trouble?

That would render any warrenty useless if still in effect though.

I've now gotten a Toshiba.

.

[mountain_rage]

You could always look on Ebay for a laptop with the same motherboard, but a different messed up component, or even check to see if your local escrap yard has scavenger days, where you can go in and buy old parts for dirt cheap. Can't imagine it would be all that difficult to swap out the motherboard so long as its the same model. Althernatively you could find a laptop with a different problem than yours, but that the parts from yours can fix.