Computers

[Dalyansteve]

I wanted to start a new thread about computers as it probably relates to all, whether we live here or not.
Most of us nowadays probably use laptops and seeing as we have a resident expert I have a few questions.
I have an old Acer travelmate laptop that has refused to start up on my return from England and just shows the opening page with the logo and script saying press f2 to enter setup. Doing this does nothing and putting the recovery discs in does nothing. Is there a replaceable cell on the motherboard for the bios or has my hard drive died, if it has and I replace the hard drive can I reboot using the original discs?
I am not desperate as I have another one that is 'only' 2 years old and just bought another one whilst in England but my wife likes playing her xp compatible games on the antique 4 year old laptop. It is also a bit of an oddity as it has a3ghz pentium 4 cpu with a whopping great heatsink, so bit of a beasty really.

[Andy]

Hi Steve

to me it sounds like something may have come adrift

check hard drive and memory are in good and tight as the pc appears not to be booting past its boot screen

if it was hard drive it would say it was not found etc

so it sounds as its taken a knock

let me know how you get on

[Dalyansteve]

Thanks Andy, took it apart, well as much as you can without ending up with a pile of bits that won't go back together, removed enormous amounts of fluff and dust, everything was good and tight. Left it for a couple of days and asked an engineer friend to use his magic finger, sorry engineering joke, to try starting it up. Exactly the same thing was happening and then suddenly it came back to life saying something about power cut during shut down and would now start. I am now thinking the dear wife may have shut the lid while it was shutting down and while we were away the battery ran down completely. Not her fault but we were in a bit of a hurry to leave and always hide the important things while we are away.
While all this was happening I decided to get an external hard drive to back up everything on mine, I admit I did the very thing I always advise people not to do and bought the seemingly cheap Turkish one from Migros.
What a palaver!!! would it work, heck wasted the whole day, took it back got the smaller Western digital one, just about managed to save my data before having to reload everything again back to new. Wow what a difference, cleaner and faster but another day gone.
So to anyone thinking of a laptop, give the Acers a good look, recovery does work and they seem to last both the 5 year old and the 3year old one are proving the test of time and believe me they are in use all the time.