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My Dell Inspiron croaked

mainstreetmark

mainstreetmark

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 7, 2003
2,228
293
Saint Augustine, FL
Well,I've been ready to upgrade to a 17" PowerBook and get back on the Apple side of things, but decided to wait for the 'imminent' upgrades to the PowerBook line.

*cough*

Anyways, what do you guys think I should do?
- Dump money into a new harddrive for the Dell.
- Borrow my mother's 500 MHz iBook
- Don't bother waiting, and get a used 17PB off of eBay now, since even if upgrades are announced at Le SteveNote, they won't be available for 4 months after that.
 
What do you mean croaked? Physical or software problem?

Bad hard drive?

Dead motherboard? Burnt CPU? Dead Power supply? Bad memory?

How do you its the hard drive?

Make sure the PSU/Board are still functional as those are likely candidates for "croaked" systems. But you are right, the most common is a bad hard drive (from poor air circulation/overheating/bad luck).

In terms of PB upgrade? I'd wait--screw the old ones :)
 
Well, it went down like this:

About every day or so, the system would just flat out lock up. Mouse would quit moving, etc... I've managed to get rid of my blue screens of death in XP for a while, but I could never get rid of this lockup problem. Blamed it on the OS, or possibly some bad ram.

Today, it locked up a bit more unusually. First, Winamp quit playing music. Then, when I clicked on the taskbar, it locked up. Switched to another app, that app would lock up. I eventually became aware that all these things were waiting on data from the harddrive, which was now making a repetitive "r-r-r-r-r-read... *pause*..." kind of a thing. After letting it go for a minute or so, I rebooted.

Then, it said it couldn't find the harddrive, and I also can't seem to get it to boot from the Windows CD. Since I hate fooling with PC hardware anyways, I decided to just turn it off for a while. I'm currently on my mom's iBook (much smaller!).

It's most likely a cooked harddrive. It lives on top of a desk in a room usually in the high 70's/low 80's, and the cooling fan is nearly always on.
 
my suggestion: throw that damm thing off the roof...

but seriously, you mentioned that you could borrow your mom's iBook to bridge the time till the powerbook update. I would do that instead of sinking money into the dell.

when get the 17" aluBook, take your time and try to get a really cheap small HD (maybe from a friend who upgrades his notebook?) and see if a different drive fixes the problem... if so, sell the Dell on eBay...

vSpacken
 
BSOD's in Windows xp are either bad drivers or bad ram/harddrive.

PSU failures would mean random shutdowns/restarts.

Sigh...it is almost always hardware failure--with XP bsods do not happen unless you have inferior ram or psu (12v rails are weak causing CPU instabilities).

CPU instabilities means that programs that usually run well will lock with "errors". For instance, if i overclock my FSB from default of 167 to 180, with no extra voltage i get punished. Take Aol Instant messenger for example. Definitely not a tough program to load--but when you're overclocked (an example of undervolted CPU), then it will crash -- with the usual jibberish.
 
Here's what you should do with the dell...

Take a trip to Michael Dell's house in Round Rock, Texas, and smash that sucker to pieces (the laptop, not michael dell, unless you are so inclined to do so), and tell him that his stupid hardware sucks, and that you're getting a Mac.
 
Any idea why both the harddrive AND the optical CD ROM can't be found?

Motherboard? Loose cable somewhere?

This is an Inspiron 8100, and it does appear to be take-appartable.
 
getting the new upgraded pb's when they come out is pointless, there will be little difference in anything, i would replace the hd for now, get another year out of it, then buy a pb G5
 
Originally posted by mainstreetmark
Any idea why both the harddrive AND the optical CD ROM can't be found?

Motherboard? Loose cable somewhere?

This is an Inspiron 8100, and it does appear to be take-appartable.
Click to expand...

-mainstreetmark

It could be many things, but personally I'd look at the MoBo.

How is the ventilation? Are the vents clear? Is it near anything that might preheat the intake air, like a radiator? Any electrical problems?

One funny little anecdote, I was having computational issues in college 10+ years ago, my IIsi would lock for no apparent reason - and I was quite good at keeping it clean. I tested the wall socket and determined that the power was running at 59hz, not 60hz. Apparently, the university played with their substation to save a cycle a second and money (don't ask me how that managed this). TVs and stereos don't really care but my computer sure did.

They were able to get away with this because only a few students had computers at the time.
 
Tell the Dull: "Don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you"

Seriously though, HDs are pretty cheap these days. Changing one might not be that difficult.
 
Ok, I dropped in a new 30 gig ($200 at CompUSA - saw my first G5 there).

This computer now acts like it's brand new, now that it doesn't have a 3 year old installation of XP on it. Of course, I've gotten 4 BSODs (3 with old nVidia drivers, and a fourth after installing all the XP updates), and two flat-out lockups.

New iMacs, iPods, no PowerBooks. Crap.
 
It has been a horrid day. It seems like as soon as I upgraded the nVidia drivers, I started getting more lockups. Then, XP decided to upgrade itself, which for some reason started making nVidia BSOD again, so I had to re-upgrade that driver.

I still get complete lockups, and have pretty much NOTHING fancy on this computer. It really sucks, and I'm SOOO leaning towards bailing on the 17"PB upgrade, and just getting the existing 17PB off of eBay.
 
sounds like more trouble than it's worth. If you're comfortable with the iBook (as it seems), go and buy a Mac. The sooner you buy, the longer your model stays non-obsolete :p
 
has anyone noticed problems with windows xp and hard drives hard drives seem to pack in much quicker with this os than any other ive gone though 2 already within a year of getting it. dont get me wrong not dissing the os its actualy quite effecient at its job just happens to share bad blood..


I recomend using your moms book and just decided if you want to fix the hard drive then the video card and then what ever else decideds its had enough

*COUGH* hard drive fails and then the video card goes agggghhhhhhh!!!! helll

also use a g3 iMac much better quite a bit slow but it works.. yayyy
 
Hey, My 8100 died the same way. I found many tools to help repair it. (Except the harddrive was toast)
My lockups were from the GPU (Geforce 2 GO) Overheating.
i8kfan
Offers fan control that relived the system considerably, (like using both fans to cool, but at lower speed)

The reason the CD-ROM and Harddrive failed together is that the CD-ROM is slave to the Harddrive, (Even though BIOS shows them on 2 seperate IDE Channels.(wierd quirk)

Also the Nvidia drivers from Nvidia will lock up the system, Use Detonator Destroyer to remove the offending drivers and install the ones from Windows Update site (After installing DX9)
Mine has been stable ever since.

©¿©¬
 
Ha, I bet that was exactly it. I do most of my work in an office that gets up to above 82 degrees (according to my Gallalean thermo), and was always surprised the fans didn't run more.

Anyways, the stupid Dell is underneath the desk at the moment with a brand-new harddrive AND brand-used LCD hinges, but I'm on a new 1.3G 17" PB now.

Life seems so much less bleak now that I managed to remove at least one frustrating thing from my life.
 
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