A day late and $180 short(er)

[WalkinTarget]

We start this story about 2 years ago, as I inherited a dead laptop from a teacher at school who had purchased it for his son to go off to college (and play games on it non-stop until he was kicked out of college). I was pretty much instrumental in directing Dad to the vendor to order it over 3 years ago, so it sort of found its way to me to do the troubleshooting on it, but the kid had already ordered another laptop to replace it.

Fast forward to this week, as I had been getting really annoyed with my generic HP laptop, which altho it is not a gamer lappy at all, does what I want it to do most of the time. I keep eyeing up the dead laptop, hoping that it will cure itself so I can sell off the HP and use this one instead. Specs are rather modest, but like I said, it is light years ahead of my Celeron 2.4/ATI 345m granny laptop.

Specs:
Windows XP Professional
2.4GHz Athlon 64 3700+ DTR
1024MB 400MHz DDR RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128MB
Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 80GB 7,200rpm

I check on to search Ebay (even tho I hate it with a passion) maybe once a month, and damned if I didn't see one for sale !! It was in fine working condition save for an issue with the wireless card (I could use mine for spare parts, obviously). I bid on it and set my final price at $160. I then sweated it out all day as the auction wound down, but I did win the thing.

So now I decided to hook up the dead one and give it one last try .... I had disassembled it last night and reseated everything, and it powered up for 3 seconds (with no POST screen) before shutting down. So the least I had was a bad LCD panel, but my guess was it was a bad mainboard. So after letting it plugged in overnight, I hit the power button ..

still dead ... Well duh ...

I hit the power button again, and this time hold the INSERT key down, which resets the BIOS to defaults in case anything went weird .. and ...

the damn thing booted up !!

OOPS ... so its too late to cancel the auction. I've already Paypal'ed my $180, so I now have a second semi-gamer laptop on its way from Cali. To say I was stunned that the damn thing booted is an understatement, but I feel like a FOOL for not trying this last night before I bid on this laptop that I no longer need.

Note to self: Cover all your bases and test your junk before calling it a day and sinking more money into something. I am sure I can recoup the $180 on the second laptop, but I would have preferred to have put the effort into fully testing the 'dead' one from the start.

[juneau]

Now you can start Laptop LANs.

[Duke{CLR}]

I'm sure you wont loose any sleep over have a few extrap laptops hangin around.

[WalkinTarget]

LoL .. OK, the peanut gallery has commented.

Now I can bring the laptops to a LAN, but I don't have to host it at my house anymore ! These things aren't gonna play CoD4, but they do a nice job and UT2k4 (47+ FPS), Doom 3 and any games from 2+ years ago.

[Hammy]

Dude-

Just because you have it going now, and you reseated everything, doesnt mean there isnt a flaw in there somewhere......

I'd say you have your bases still covered in the event one goes south

[WalkinTarget]

Hammy, I agree completely on that fact. This laptop was declared dead by me when I first got my hands on it 2 years ago, so I even called the previous owner last night and gave him the details.
He didn't seem to care and has moved on to a newer/faster model, so my hope was that he had the missing parts for it, such as the manuals, restore CD or the hard drive.

I gave him the hard drive back earlier this year with an IDE/SATA to USB external adapter cable which allowed him to pull his data off of it. I wish he would have kept the damn thing, but its not that essential considering I have plenty of spare parts.

This model does run hot, so I'm going to remove all thermal paste and reapply AS5 in its place, then hope for the best.