17 October 2006

My laptop is unusable.

This evening, while 'playing' EL, looking for some info for an upcoming contest, the EL window became garbled. It might have seemed to be an EL bug, but the problem was that both my screens got all kind of lines on them, covering other windows as well.
As soon as I closed the El window, those lines disappeared.
I thought maybe the video card fan (if any) died, so EL overheats it, which causes this problem, or, maybe, ZP is acting up.
Restarting the computer didn't help, so I said, hmm, maybe I should update my video drivers, who knows?

After installing the latest Omega drivers, I restarted the computer and had the unpleasant surprise to notice that the POST screen also has similar visual artifacts. Shit!
Now there are lines allover the screen, and 1 in 4 pixels are missing :/ Which makes doing anything with the computer a pain. EL doesn't even work anymore, so my only choice is to get a new computer.
Now, I planned to get a new computer sometime next year, so it's not really a tragedy that my current computer is unusable. I tend to see the good thing: tomorrow I will have a faster computer, and, if I am lucky, maybe I will manage to fix this laptop as well, so I will have a brand new desktop and an usable laptop.
Tomorrow most of the day will be taken by buying the new computer, installing it, configuring stuff, transferring my data and settings, open the laptop and see if there is anything I can do with it..

Sometimes life sucks, but you have to take the minor annoyances that happen to you as a lesson, and try to find the good part. And maybe this is God's way of telling me to update my computer :)

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

it must be a huge coinidence but a few miniutes ago the same thing happened to my laptop. the el window became srammbled with black and red lines. when i restrated my laptop i was also missing around 1 in 4 pixels and had yellow lines at the post start up window. so far the computer is not able to load the os, it just stays in the post start up screen.i have a ABS mayhem 4 laptop. plz let me know if u find any info about the cause of this.
-broken

18/10/06 02:50  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What kind of laptop do you have?
I had the same problem with a Dell inspiron 2 years ago. Missing pixels, lines, and sometimes white screen. Tried all kinds of video upgrades (nVidia 2GO), but nothing work.

Noticed one day the video would fix itself whenever I bent the case from corner to corner. Finally I opened the case and found the video cable wasn't setting properly. It still hasn't after 2 years, so every week or so i have to remove and connect the cable.

18/10/06 11:35  
Blogger Radu said...

I have an Emachines M6805. It's an AMD 64, +3000, Ati mobility 9600.

Well, I got my new desktop, which is an AMD 64 X2 +4600, 2 GB RAM, 300 GB SATA hdd, and crappy onboard card.
I got a GF 7300 GSD card for 90 USD, so the grand total, after taxes, was about 950 USD.

Anyway, now it seems that my laptop fixed itself (wtf??), so I will be using it for other stuff, such as when I travel and when I want tot est new OSes.

20/10/06 02:14  

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