Laptop Problem

My Gericom EGO 1.70Ghz Centrino laptop has died on me, without apparant reason.

At christmas, I had been having mild problems with it, windows frequently bluescreened, sometimes windows had problems booting up, and everything worked very slowly.

I got hold of my original restore discs, and cleaned it all out. Since then, it had been fine, until the last week or so, when it has been playing up in the same kind of manner. First of all it started to slow down, became very very slow to boot up, and crashed to a blue screen (to do with paging space or hard drive read errors) occasionally. These crashes were normally preceded by extended periods of stalling, non-responsiveness, and lots of noisy disc access.

Today, it seemed to be ok, a little slower than normal. I left it running on my floor, went to make some dinner, and I came back to the laptop having crashed. Now, one of the fans inside makes a large amount of buzzy noise upon startup, it boots into the bios screen, and then either hangs there, or then encounters an error of some sort - sometimes hard drive errors (s.m.a.r.t. check failed, sometimes it doesn't recognise there is a hard drive at all.) Another point of interest is that sometimes the processor is clocked by the BIOS at 600Mhz, even though its a 1.70Ghz processor!

I'm sure it may turn on alright tomorrow, if previous problems I've had are anything to go by, but this has now gone beyond a joke. There must be a reason for this! It's not under warranty anymore, but is it worth my taking it to a computer shop? My friend said it could be the motherboard? Is it worth trying to get a new one? I've tried cleaning dust out, having a look inside for loose connections and so on, but my hardware competence doesn't stretch that far!

For reference, the laptop's spec is thus:

1.70Ghz Intel centrino processor
512Mb RAM
Windows XP Home
DVD-RW/CD-RW Drive
Toshiba 80Gb Hard Drive (IDE)

If you need any other information, just ask!

Thanks in advance for any help, I don't want to give up on it just yet! (It's only 1.5 years old!)

 

Look up the model at the Gericom website, they should have diagnostic utilities for download (there may be some on the CD that came with it). Run the utility for the harddrive, that seems to be where most of the error messages are coming from. If they don't have HDD utilities you could get them from Toshiba.

One of the fans is making noise. It may be a heat problem. If you can remove the fan or even access it, try flushing around where the bearings are with Contact Cleaner (saved one of my graphics fans recently). See if you can spin the blades to ensure they move freely. If you don't already have it, get a can of "compressed air" for blowing out dust.

Check temperatures and voltages in the BIOS settings.

Matt

 

Hello mattbailey,

To find out what the tempuratures are:

http://www3.sympatico.ca/gtopala/about_siw.html Gives you full system info besides temps - no install needed, execute and run.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/HDD_Thermometer/1112635863/1 This program sits in the tray monitoring HD temps realtime.

When using the laptop, put in on something like blocks in the 4 corners to allow air circulation under the bottom.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys, but it just became rather more terminal than i'd hoped!

Today, after leaving it to cool down and stuff after last night, I turned it on again. It now shows the first bios screen. It still mis-clocks the processor speed at 600Mhz instead of 1.70Ghz, and seems to detect and test the RAM and the 2 IDE drives (Primary: Toshiba 80Gb HDD, Secondary: DVD-RW/CD-RW Drive) fine, but then it hangs. Then the network boot utility shows up, and then it reports that the hard drive is S.M.A.R.T. enabled, but a check failed. I can't get into the bios, and thus I can't boot from my cd drive (I think the default secondary boot device is the network, so I'd have to change them in the bios settings) and I can't boot into windows to run any diagnostic utlities, for obvious reasons.

Additionally, there are no diagnostic utilities on the discs supplied. I have one with my copy of windows on it, and one with a few drivers for additional bits and pieces on it, but otherwise nothing else. I really am at a loss now, I can't test the hard drive immediately because I don't have anything to test it in - would it be worth my while paying a few quid and getting a 2.5" caddy to see if the drive is really at fault? Are there any other possibilities?

Gericom's website is rather poor, given they seem to be primarily a German company, and plus I bought my laptop from Aldi (a UK supermarket) and it isn't listed as a model on their website.

The noise has also subsided a bit, but that couldn't be stopping it booting up could it?

 

See, this is one area in which i'm not that worried, because when i re-installed windows after the problems at christmas, I backed up all my essential data, university work and so on onto my usb hard drive while I had a chance.

So.... would it be worth buying a new 2.5" hard drive and trying to start again with that one? I mean, based on the idea that if I bought a new one, then if it didn't work, then I could always flog it on ebay as basically new with a loss of only a few pounds. Would that be worth it?

 

Hi matt,

So.... would it be worth buying a new 2.5" hard drive and trying to start again with that one?
Sounds like a good plan to me. What are your other choices?

See, this is one area in which i'm not that worried, because when i re-installed windows after the problems at christmas, I backed up all my essential data, university work and so on onto my usb hard drive while I had a chance.
Also gratifying to hear someone used their noodle. One of the more consistent whine's I see here is "can't re load windows - I didn't back up ".

Regards - Charles

 

Thank you all very much for your help, you've been great. Any ore advice is appreciated!

So, i'm pretty sure i'll buy a new drive and see how that goes. I'm pretty sure it's an IDE 2.5" drive, but I just wanted to make sure....Can't be spending 50-100 pounds on a drive only to find out its the wrong type!

These are pictures of the drive in it's housing (I found the screws on the housing hard to undo):

http://www.geocities.com/kikked_in_the_teeth/Photo-0093.jpghttp://www.geocities.com/kikked_in_the_teeth/Photo-0094.jpg

What type of drive am I looking for, if you can tell from these photos? (Sorry about the poor quality, I took them on my phone) And does anyone have any reccommendations?

 

Hi Matt,

Yes it is a 2.5 laptop drive. Perhaps "our" Matt from down under can tell you more.

I woud go to the Toshiba site and look for your model and see what info there is about it and once you know and the price Toshiba charges, look around sites such as Newegg - Outpost.com and others will add to that.

There's a "sticky" at the top of the Hardware section:
Approved PC accs. Retailer List

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=39124

Regards - Charles

 

I've found the model - it's a Toshiba MK8025GAS, I found a similar model on ebay, and a reputable shop online that sells the exact same drive, so thats all good. I'll order it when I get a minute, from one of the two places. Now I've just got to get the screws on the caddy undone! They're impossibly tight! I guess I'll get my dad to help with that one....

When I get it all sorted in the next few weeks, I'll try and post back with the results - whether the problem was the hard drive alone or not. Fingers crossed!

Thanks very much, to everyone that has helped!

 

Sorry to bump an essentially obsolete thread, but i just thought i'd let you all know that I just installed the new replacement hard drive, and as yet, all seems to be absolutely fine! I might be speaking too soon, but the laptop has been on constantly for about 6 or 7 hours formatting and installing suchlike, and i havent had any crashes or even small niggles as yet. It's like having a new laptop!

Thank you all very much for your help! I'm sure if it hasn't fixed the problem you'll see me back here soon enough!

Cheers again.

 

So far, so good

Thanks for letting us know.

Matt