My laptop went pooof!

Gumby · Post by **Gumby** » Mon Apr 16, 2001 11:36 pm

I bought this thing in the middle of March and had to wait 2 weeks just to get it. Now after 2 weeks of having the stupid thing up and dies on me! GRRRRRRR! It started with a little bit of hard drive corruption, then progressed into the machine not booting occasionally, then today I got a couple of BIOS Crashes(The ones with all the ASCII characters in different colours), and now I can't even install the OS. Well I suppose it could be worse, I'll be getting an RMA number tomorrow and it will be off to the graveyard for it. This thing has been nothing but problems since I got it....ugh!

Sorry guys just had to vent

Sean

Reg Kmet · Post by **Reg Kmet** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 12:11 am

Give it to me! Probably better and faster then my desktop machine!

plucky duck · Post by **plucky duck** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 12:13 am

you bought this as a new or used item?

renovation · Post by **renovation** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 12:14 am

gumby what brand is it ?

TheManiacal1 · Post by **TheManiacal1** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 12:45 am

the hard drive of my Dell Inspiron went out after 2 weeks, twas a good thing that i bought a laptop hard drive to IDE hard drive adapter and backed up some of the important stuff. you can find them on eGay for about $15-25. i know it's too late to do this now, but something to defintely invest in for the future...

good luck!

Snelski · Post by **Snelski** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 3:45 am

You know, I got this older lappy (Toshiba 460CDX) that came with a 2GB hard drive and it works great. I was thinking the same thing about backing it up and actually I wanted to create a Ghost image of it in case I screwed it up with my infinite tweaking abilities

, but something isn't right...

I got one of those adapters from Micro Center for $9.99 + tax and thought this would be no problem. Pulled the drive and hooked it up to my server to back it up, and the thing doesn't register right even in the bios. It comes up with these reverse L's and when I boot into Win98se it never shows up. In the BIOS setup it is reported as a 900MB drive when I let it detect it, not a 2GB drive that it is... I've only seen those reverse L's one time before and that's when it was a bad drive - but this things seems fine. When I put it back in the laptop it works like a charm, defrags fine and everything...

Any ideas from you guys why it would do that? I'd really like to avoid having data lost if I can help it, since my wife uses it mainly away from the network I have setup at home. Anyway, LMK if you do know something about this - thanks.

Gumby · Post by **Gumby** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 7:49 am

Wow, what responses! Thanks for all the support. I was just venting last night I talked to KDS tech support the first guy asked to do the standard stuff(scandisk, chkdsk, and reinstall the OS), did that and then the machince wouldn't even install the OS. Talked to the second guy and he said he had discussed it with the first guy and they figured I would be calling back. Their peliminary diagnosis is that the HDD controller is FUBAR'd!

They are having their manager call me today with an RMA number so that I can get it replaced, which is good cause this thing is toast!

The laptop, for those who are interested, is a KDS (same guys who do the monitors) model KN6480iPTD-0N. Considering I paid $2600CND for it new it was a steal, I just hope this is not a trend. The spec's are P3-800(Desktop Processor), 128MB PC-100 SODIMM, 20GB HDD, DVD, 14.1" TFT Screen, 56K Modem and 10/100 NIC Built in. This laptop smokes my wife's P3-733 desktop. I just wish it wouldn't smoke so much!

Oh well, I'll let you know how this saga plays out.

TheManiacal1 · Post by **TheManiacal1** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 1:38 pm

Snelski - if you want, send me the hd and i'll try and Ghost it for ya on my machine. or you can borrow my adapter to try it out. i've heard that some of the 2.5" IDE hd -> 3.5" IDE hd adapters aren't always compatible. worth a shot though... email me if you're interested.

Gumby - sounds like you've got a nice system there.

although i think that KDS is kinda d!ck!ng you around in getting that thing RMA'ed. i don't know what kinda tests you did, and i won't question them, but my first suspect would be the HD over the HD controller. good luck w/ it though!!!

as i type this, i'm Ghosting my laptop's HD right now. ugh... Ghosting about 18GB off of a 20GB laptop drive that only spins at like 4000RPM tops. <SIGH!!!!> ass-slow...

Gumby · Post by **Gumby** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 1:46 pm

nay, they just wanted to do scan and check disk to make sure the system didn't have some screwed up cluster...fairly standard stuff. An I would agree it is the controller because of the BIOS dumps. But to tell you the truth I really don't care, I just want this puppy gone, and a new laptop in my hot little hands ASAP.

Yup backups suck but what can you do?

sethpa · Post by **sethpa** » Tue Apr 17, 2001 5:58 pm

man, I can remember doing backups with a floppy, them was the days................

sethpa

Gumby · Post by **Gumby** » Wed Apr 18, 2001 7:25 pm

Well I dropped the laptop off at one of KDS's authorized repair facilities, hopefully it will be back in my hands in a couple of days.

The thing wouldn't even boot from the CD when they tried it at the centre....hehehe stick a fork in it and call it dinner.