So, user comes to me with a two-year-old Averatec 2300 laptop that “won’t boot”. He’d had some weirdness with his XP install before so I went in thinking the OS was messed up somehow. But once I actually got the laptop in my hands, I realized I was dealing with a hardware problem.
Symptoms
- Powering on, you can hear the optical drive whir (inserting a disc will cause it to spin up)
- Power light is on
- Wifi light is on (assuming the wifi switch is not “OFF”)
- HD light flashes once
- Fan does not spin
- I do not hear the HD spin up
- No BIOS screen, display is unlit
Searching around on the web, I found a lot of people complaining about Averatec. The most relevant thing I found was a thread with the amusing title of 2370 sleep turns into coma.
Diagnosis
Even if the RAM were bad (and I had successfully memtest’ed it a week or so ago) I’d expect to hear the fan spin up. Basically, the laptop hardware seems to be “stuck” in a suspend/hibernate state.
Treatment
If this were a desktop I’d pull the CMOS battery and use a jumper to clear the BIOS. Unfortunately, the impression I got from the Intertron is that there is no jumper and the battery is soldered to the board. Rather than spend the rest of my day trying to revive this piece of garbage, I’m just going to grab the hard drive, copy the data off, and tell the guy to buy a non-Averatec laptop.
Spoken like a true IT guy…most IT guys in my company take one look and say – “new laptop, coming right up.” At least you took the time to at least try to diagnose the problem instead of immediately pushing the guy out the door with a simple response.
There is definitely something to the “new laptop, coming right up” policy. Trying to debug hardware problems is time-consuming and it could easily be more cost effective to simply order a replacement than monkey around with no guarantee that you’ll be able to fix it.
This technicians response is a typical reflection of our throw away society and sad state of affairs we have “advanced our lifestyle towards” with Cheap accessible high technology made cheaply in China.
“What, your (XXX…Car), Refrigerator, laptop, cellphone, etc… doesn’t work? throw it away and buy a new one!! because “time is money”
The expectations of the things we NEED and the lifestyle we expect have created this “just get a new one syndrome” and instilled in our young and twentysomethings the lack of respect for the work that went into making a high tech laptop in the firstplace.
Work that was done by employees toiling in poor conditions for crumb wages while polluting their environment,
(PEOPLE DIED AND SOME CORPORATE SON OF A BITCH MADE MILLIONS RIDING ON THE BACKS OF CHEAP FOREIGN LABOR TO MAKE THE LAPTOP THIS TECH DISMISSED AS NOT WORTH 4 HOURS OF HIS TIME TO FIX.)
So, IT GUYS… take a deep breath, relax in the comforts of your American Dilletantism and look again at whether it is “Worth” fixing a machine that so many hours and resources were used to make and be grateful it was not you toiling in some Chinese computer sweatshop for Pennies!
Unsolder the battery, try HARDER to figure out what is really wrong with power management, and ask yourself what you would think if you took your 2006 car to the mechanic and he said; “just get a new one”…
Respectfully submitted by a foreign car “technician”.