Yesterday as I typed at the start of the day the laptop went dark. That was rather unusual as I didn’t notice the battery running low and I was on AC. I switched outlets, nothing. Flipped it over to take out the bottom and nothing obvious as to a problem. So at this point I’m thinking power supply or mother board. No lights when I plug it in, no ticks or sound period. After a buddy came by with a volt meter the cord is good but nothing coming from the A/C outlet on the mother board. That sucks.
A new board is $460 and I’ve only had it since Jan. of 05. I was hoping it would last me five years… barley made it two. So now the decision spend 60 to 80 percent of what it would cost for a new toy to get me back to 05 technology or get another one. That just burns me I paid extra for a gig of memory and a 12 cell battery just so I wouldn’t have to do this in a few years. I even busted out the old i200 to see if I can get Xubuntu running on it. Given enough hammering I think I could but man is it slow. I guess it could be worse, could have been the tower that I use for work and what Kay uses. Maybe I should be thankful that one didn’t bite the dust. I’d hate to think what hoops I’d have to jump through to get the drive to boot with a new motherboard.
Update 3/15/2007: I must be a complete idiot. After much googling and almost deciding on getting an external battery charger, 70 dollars vs the price of a new mother board, I put everything back together and turned it on. Booted with no problems and battery is at full charge. Disconnect the power for a while and plug it back in, battery is charging. If I was smarter I would have thought maybe the drive went bad or faulted which caused the problem in the first place. I never swapped out the drives. This is great cause I didn’t want to replace it… but call me stupid cause I didn’t figure it out sooner.
Update 3/17/2007: Maybe I wasn’t as dumb as I thought. The system has not run for more than 4 hours at a time now. In the last 12 hours won’t stay up more than 5 minutes regardless which drive I put in. Very disappointed at the moment. So I’m working on the old i200 loading Debian.
