Hardware lockup - need suggestions for diagnosing

[Ben Scott]

On 12/11/06, Larry Cook <lcook at sybase.com> wrote:
> Hard drive - I removed the hard drive and disabled it in the BIOS.

  No hard drive, no battery, running on AC, and it still locks up
running a memory test?  Yah, that's almost certainly a fault on a
primary circuit board.  Tracing the fault to a specific component or
trace will be very difficult, if not impossible.  Fixing it once
you've found it would be harder still.

  Like Neil Schelly says, you're past the point of diminishing
returns.  It's time to go for wholesale part replacement.  Or
wholesale computer replacement -- you can get a new laptop for under
$500 these days.  Or a nice one for under $1000.

> External warming - Not sure how to do this other than light a fire in
> the fireplace, but that might tempt me to throw in the laptop! :-)

  You can do it with an oven that can maintain fine control of
temperature at 90 - 150 degrees Fahrenheit.  (I expect this excludes
most household ovens.)  At a past job, I was involved in a situation
where they used a laboratory oven to determine what temperature
something started failing at.  They heated the circuit board to a
given temperature, took it out, and ran their tests.

  I should have realized what I was envisioning is not worth the
time/effort/etc for a commodity laptop.  Plus you'll likely just reach
the same conclusion either way: Motherboard needs to be replaced.

> Video - Dan suggested using a Live CD and just trying the console.  How
> do I do that?

  This is up there with my oven idea.  While it's technically valid,
it's time-consuming, and likely will yield the same conclusion no
matter what: Motherboard needs to be replaced.

  Laptops aren't like a desktop PC; the CPU support, video, peripheral
I/O all tend to be on one circuit board.  Sometimes even the memory
and CPU heatsink will be part of a single PCB assembly.  So no matter
what the problem is, you're replacing the same part.

> Reset connectors, etc. - Haven't tried this yet.

  Even that is probably not worth the effort.  While the Dell laptops
are easier to service then most laptops, you're still talking lots of
tiny screws, plastic tabs, sub-assemblies, all fitted together like a
Japanese puzzle box.

  How much is your time worth?  :)

-- Ben