My laptop broke last Saturday, hence the lack of posting. I was going about my usual laptop business (myspace, gmail, blogging, flickr, etc.) put my laptop down to go grab a glass of lemonade and when I came back the screen was frozen.
Neither alt+ctrl+del nor ctrl+shift+esc helped, the screen and mouse were as frozen as could be. Since I couldn’t get task manager to appear to make everything better I had to force the computer to shut down.
I went about some other day-to-day business and when I returned about ten minutes later my laptop wouldn’t turn on. I got some flashing lights but no noise then the flashing would stop. I realized I wasn’t hearing the hard drive spin and it looked like I had a big problem on my hands.
I don’t do hardware, so my first best guess was that it my hard drive, so I grabbed a friend’s hard drive and replaced mine with theirs to see if it would work. It didn’t.
Then I swapped out our RAM and bingo! That worked great! So now all I have to do is grab some RAM (I think since I need to buy new, I’ll go straight for the 1GB rather than just replacing my dead 512MB. I’m quite excited to make the upgrade on my first ever hardware solution.
Along the way I discovered a number of great online resources for this problem of mine.
Information about Dell Inspiron 600m
I spent some time with the official Dell Inspiron 600m manual and got only a bit of information about the system and how to install new hardware.
On guy at Yahoo! answers did a great round up about my Inspiron 600m laptop!