[m i a o w] the cat

So the Humber is sick and won’t change up to its highest gear. It’s going to be looked at by the Humber guru who dropped in my original engine about a bazillion (ten? yike!) years ago. Everything was going OK in the world of my important possessions for, um, about four days. I’m not sure whether installing Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 update or Google Notebook extension was responsible for the death of my laptop, but there’s nothing else I can attribute it to. Sad, deposed Thinkpad R40.

As L and I cooked white wine and drank risotto on Wednesday night, I tried to start it up. I tried many times. A couple of times I got the option to go to ‘last good config’ or ’safe mode’ - but it wouldn’t really go any further. I stayed up last night wrestling with the same problems and somehow even got through to do a system restore to take it back before the Dragon install - and it was successful, but the problem persists. I press the power button, the cdrom drive does its spinup noises, the hard drive makes a few noises, the screen stays ominously black, and all is quiet until I switch it off again (when it gets even quieter).

GOD! M says I should take it to a fix-it person and my body spasms in denial. But I have to do something. I am actually working from home today on M’s laptop, without which, I would have been cactus. From experience, working-from-home cred can be seriously undermined with stories about dodgy hardware. [Sigh]. So besides dreams of going out and buying a new Mac Powerbook [dribble] I’m stuck. C’mon geekoids - throw me a line?!

P.S Have tried exciting boot disks, but as I can only make it boot once in 30 startups, I’m not having much luck. And no, I don’t have a floppy drive. It’s sounding like hardware, not software to me. And yes, have pulled out battery and RAM. Without joy. Specs? WinXP/ThinkPad R40 2681-42M - and I have no XP disk… blah blah blah

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COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS

Hmm… they’re called MacBook Pros or MacBooks…now.. I’m not too fond of the name, but like the machine a lot.

Whenever I work on a PC-based machine…I make a bootable Ghost image of the machine…so that when, not if, but when it dies, I can get it up and running fairly quickly.

Given that your machine doesn’t startup except 1 out every 30 times, I’d say it’s a hardware error.

If you have another computer with access to the internet and a CD-burner, you could always get and make a diagnostics CD to see what is wrong with your machine. Most of the linux-based Diagnostics CDs are bootable.

ThinkPads can use the optical drive as a boot device, this can be changed in the BIOS. That would at least tell you whether it is the hard drive or not. If it boots reliable off the CD drive, then the problem is pretty much the hard drive.

If you’re really stuck, let me know via e-mail, and I’ll see what else I can do. BTW, will be out of contact for the next two days for a wedding. Took ‘em long enough…

AdriftAtSea typed this on Sep 01 06 at 10:39 pm

Thank you
You’re right - on both counts. They are MacBook Pros (and I want one in a yearning desperate way) and it is a hardware issue - the motherboard. I did make a diagnostic cd, but as it wouldn’t boot at all by the end of last night, I took it to a fix-it shop this morning, where they did everything that I’d already done and then sold me an adapter so I could plug the lappy hard drive into my desktop. So I’ve rescued my stuff, and if I want to get a new motherboard for my Thinkpad I can kiss goodbye to about a grand (including labour). Gah.