A Tale Of Two Laptops

Maybe it should be three, but the first one was a brand spanking new Lenovo ThinkPad T60 my brother just purchased. I helped him get some software set up on it and transfer files from his old laptop. The T60 was a core-duo sweetie with the trick little fingerprint reader. I still think those things are more gimmick than anything else, but it does point the way to the future of authentication.

The other two laptops were of the sick variety.

Laptop #1 belonged to a former co-worker of my wife’s. It was a Dell Inspirion 2200, roughly seven months old. Its problem was that it only felt like recognizing the hard drive, well, when it felt like it. Once I got my hands on the laptop, sure enough, it was about as goofy as they come. Roughly ten percent of the time the laptop started, it would report “boot device not found”… and even the BIOS setup would report “no HDD present.” Wouldn’t matter if it was a cold boot or not. Oddly enough, the few times I did get the laptop to start, it ran fine… but reboot it, and ooops, no hard drive. I tried putting a known working 2.5″ drive into the drive bay on this laptop, and the behavior continued, regardless of which drive was inserted. The original HDD worked great in my external 2.5″ USB hard drive caddy… so I didn’t think the drive itself was the problem.

I was able to update the BIOS to the latest rev, but held no misconceptions about that helping with the problem (it didn’t). From what I could tell, the drive didn’t have much room to come loose from the connectors, so I ruled out the IDE connector being the culprit. My instinct told me the problem was somewhere on the laptop’s motherboard. The real tragedy was that when this person bought the laptop, they didn’t realize it only came with a 90-day warranty, not the usual 12 months that most laptops come with. Dell appears to be shrinking the standard warranties on some of their models in hopes to attract people to fork over more $ for more coverage. In the end, I gave the laptop back and said there wasn’t much more I could do for him except hope that Dell doesn’t make the repair costs obnoxious.

Laptop #2 had a slightly different story to tell. This was an HP Pavilion laptop, roughly 18 months old, that was also having hard drive issues. But this time, it truly was the hard drive. The BIOS was kind enough to inform me of an “imminent S.M.A.R.T. Device failure”. After running the drive diagnostics, sure enough, it failed the extended test. The good news was I was able to yank the drive and pull the client’s data off of it. And the second bit of good news was that the client had an extended warranty. So I told them to bring the laptop back to Circuit City and get the drive replaced. I’m not 100% certain of their repair procedures, so I’m not sure if they will be kind enough to restore the original factory disk image or not - but she has all the recovery CDs, and I’d be willing to handle that.

But last weekend, I sure felt like the Dr. Doolittle of laptop-land. I was about to lose my sanity if I had another call about a sick laptop. This coming weekend, I’m hoping to have a little time to myself to catch up on some DVDs from NetFlix and help my wife do some planting work on our patios. You know - quite literally get my hands dirty. And not from CPU dust bunnies, but from good old-fashioned potting soil.

[tags]usb,cpu,laptop,hp pavilion,dell inspirion 2200,drive diagnostic[/tags]