Worst laptop I've ever used.

[obeseotron]

So this morning a friend of my roomate drops off his laptop, says he'll pay me to remove the viruses from his computer, he says he specifically knows he has sasser. Easy money I think, he leaves, I pop in a Bart PE disc with Stinger on it, press run, walk away and come back to find the computer hard locked, not blue screened. I decide I'll try an Avast bart cd that is only a month old, but the the computer refuses to boot. Just blinking caps lock and a blank scren. It's plugged in and all of that. After a half dozen false starts I finally get it to boot the avast cd, but it crashes right after it pulls up the background. Since this it usually will not start at all, doing the caps lock thing and when it does start it crashes invariably. Once even while the bios bar was going across, and a bunch of other times at various stages of booting rescue cds from either of its two cd drives. The installation of xp on the hard drive blue screens but every thing else hard locks. It's an Inspiron 8200 by the way.

Any ideas?

 

[inspiron8200guy]

man, that is one messed up laptop! Try booting without the HD? Try another HD if you can. BTW- My i8200 runs great!

 

[montag451]

can you boot into MEMTEST?

 

[Abhi]

Me thinks the memory is the problem

 

[leegroves86]

man, sounds like somethings screwed up. Perhaps u could boot from a OS on a CD (linux) like Knopix or DSL (dam small linux). That could help....

 

[obeseotron]

The problem was usually not booting at all, the LCD wouldn't even turn on, booting from a cd wasn't the problem, when it did sometimes work it would always crash before I could do anything useful with it. Well I spent a while more with it, and figured out that the physical orientation of the laptop combined with putting some mild pressure on the left side of the notebook actually keeps it stable. I'm no stranger to malfunctioning PCs, I did desktop support at work for 4 years and I've fixed countless computers on the side, and I've never actually seen something as irrelevant as tilting and squeezing a laptop make things work. I booted to knoppix, no longer concerned with actually rescuing the windows installation, and sent the 6 gigs he wanted saved over the network to my desktop. The only thing I can think of is that a major component or cable is loose and squeezing it causes it to maintain contact. I might try and open it and find the mystery component later. Thanks for your help.