My sister was having problems with her Compaq laptop. The first problem was that it's a Compaq, and it sucks. 
The second problem happened yesterday. She was writing an email, and then in the middle of it closed the lid, putting the computer in standby mode.
When she opened it again about 4 hours later, the mouse was moving very slow and jagged, so she did a hard reboot. When it turned on again, it got stuck at the XP Professional splash screen. No amount of reboots could fix the problem - the darn thing just would NOT boot into Windows. No safe mode either - same problem.
No sweat, I thought - she has backups; I'll just do a fresh install. Nope. When I put in my XP disk, it wasn't able to delete the old Windows partition - I would get a BSOD in the middle of the setup program when I pressed "D" and then "Enter" and then "L" to delete the partition.
Thinking her hard drive was on the way out, I decided to download Knoppix and try it out to see if it would boot. While it was downloading, I installed Redhat on a hunch. However, about halfway through the install, the power went out and (I had taken the battery out of the laptop to cut down on heat - it had been on for about 10 hours at this point) the laptop shut down in the middle of the RedHat install.
Then, I decided to just see if XP would work, so I replaced the RedHat CD with the XP CD in the drive, booted it up, and now it's installing perfectly! No dead hard drive, and no weird BSODs on setup!
Things have a funny way of working out sometimes.
The second problem happened yesterday. She was writing an email, and then in the middle of it closed the lid, putting the computer in standby mode.When she opened it again about 4 hours later, the mouse was moving very slow and jagged, so she did a hard reboot. When it turned on again, it got stuck at the XP Professional splash screen. No amount of reboots could fix the problem - the darn thing just would NOT boot into Windows. No safe mode either - same problem.
No sweat, I thought - she has backups; I'll just do a fresh install. Nope. When I put in my XP disk, it wasn't able to delete the old Windows partition - I would get a BSOD in the middle of the setup program when I pressed "D" and then "Enter" and then "L" to delete the partition.
Thinking her hard drive was on the way out, I decided to download Knoppix and try it out to see if it would boot. While it was downloading, I installed Redhat on a hunch. However, about halfway through the install, the power went out and (I had taken the battery out of the laptop to cut down on heat - it had been on for about 10 hours at this point) the laptop shut down in the middle of the RedHat install.
Then, I decided to just see if XP would work, so I replaced the RedHat CD with the XP CD in the drive, booted it up, and now it's installing perfectly! No dead hard drive, and no weird BSODs on setup!
Things have a funny way of working out sometimes.
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