Awakenings
More than a year ago, my wife’s Acer Aspire 3100 laptop died. Not like “blue screened” or “started crashing” but completely died. It would not even turn on. Removing the battery did not help and I practically did not have any time to diagnose the problem, and buying a new laptop seemed like waste of money at the time. So I decided to take it to the repair shop who offered to take a look at it for a small amount of euros. I figured that since it would take me couple of hours to diagnose the machine and save the HD contents and since my hourly salary at work is more than the repair price, I paid the money to get the diagnosis and also have the hard drive contents burned to a DVD by the repair shop.
The diagnosis was simple: Broken motherboard. Getting a new one would have cost more than a new machine and would have been a pain to install (repair shop offered to do this for a “small” fee) but this was the time netbooks were all the rage and my wife wanted one, so I decided to throw the machine to the PC graveyard (my home office cupboard) and buy a new one (Asus EEE PC).
Couple of days ago I was cleaning the office and looking for some receipts for tax returns and saw the machine. I decided to spend a few moments with the dead laptop. I plugged it in and pressed the power button. I was quite surprised to see that the thing booted and loaded the Win XP that was on it without any problems. I did try to do this once when the machine was returned from the repair shop and it did not work at the time!
So, apparently one way to fix a broken laptop motherboard is to leave it in a dusty cupboard for more than a year.
I’m just now installing a new OS on the thing since it’s still a usable machine, especially after I added some memory from the dead Asus EEE PC netbook that was bought to replace this particular machine. In human context this would be like a liver transplant from a dead son to a dying father. I guess lives of laptops can have similar ups and downs as ours.
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