(Insert expletives here)ing, (more expletives)ing, (VERY RUDE WORD) of a computer!

Of all the luck. My work laptop has packed in on me. Good and proper!

Was using it yesterday evening, shut it down, went back to use it an hour or so later and it wouldn't fire up!
It switches on, power light coms on, caps/num lock lights flash, and that's it. Screen stays resolutely blank and dark, and the hard disk does nowt. None of the keys elicit any kind of response, there are no beeps, nothing.

It's a Lenovo (IBM) T43; don't suppose anyone knows owt about 'em?

My guess is that something hardware-ish is fecked, but cos it's a work machine I'm not allowed to take it to bits and find out! Ho hum, cue a month or so waiting for the incompetents of the IT dept. and its useless Indian call centre to finish making a complete b***ocks of sorting it

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Hope that's your personal experience and not a generalisation of IT departments..


we're not incompetent, we just don't like you

he is right though, at work i have to deal with idiots in call centres just trying to get them to take a printer for repair because its stuffed or a laptop that wouldnt turn on.

they dont care if you work in IT yourself they still think your a monkey.

Dell are quite amusing..

Sir can you run a DSET diagnostic please?

No.. The server is FUBAR. It has no OS. I've already told you that

It could be a few different things, dodgy ram, hdd dead, just something stopping a successful post.

Liam

The HDD is fine, I whipped it out and stuck it in a USB caddy to see if my data was OK and the whole drive appears to be fine and error-free. The laptop does exactly the same whether the HDD is installed or not.

IBM's service/repair man is coming out tomorrow to look at it

Dell had me stripping a Laptop once, good job i knew what i was doing.

The engineer came out with replacement parts, and told me loads of nightmare stories what he had seen - HDD taken to bits with magnetics screwdrivers, not just removed, but completely dis-assembled!!!

The best one was:

Have you booted the laptop into safe mode? Have you tried it on an external monitor?...

I put them onto a year 7 student who told them it was a dodgy LCD.....Anyone could see it was.

Never rely on a laptop, they're not the most reliable machines on earth. Lucky your HDD was ok, I'd say the problem is probably the mainboard.

Oops, forgot about this thread

IBM man came out about 2 weeks back, he swapped the mainboard - no difference. Then tried it with the 256mb RAM expansion out and just running on the standard 512 - success!

Only snag is that the 256 wasn't an IBM part so he couldn't replace it, so now its in the hands of National Grid's IT monkeys... 2 weeks and still waiting for an answer!!!