Poconos

I have no idea what the situation is in the UK but here in the US all vehicles have a serial port close to the steering column. There are very many diagnostic tools one can buy either stand alone or to interface with a laptop. Packages run from under $100 US to a lot but they all will give you the trouble codes. The higher end units will let you simply do more. Al

I hate automatic anything and turn all automatic updates off including antivirus updates and scans. However one has to be diligent and remember to do things manually. Too many times MS updates, and others, have had problems and suddenly something strange happens and the user has no idea where to start troubleshooting. By doing it manually you have some clue if something goes wrong and the bootup is faster too. Just my opinion and preference. Al

First try using an external monitor and see if that works. Should be a 15 pin VGA connector on the laptop somewhere. Also could be a video output for connection to a TV. Possibly an S-video jack. Also try shining a bright light at the screen at an angle and see if you can see what's supposed to be there. It could be the backlight which is a high intensity fluorwescent lamp that died or he high voltage module that supplies its power. Newer screens are beginning to use high intensity white LEDs instead of the fluorescent tube. Let us know what you find and we'll go from there. Al

To add to what Dalo suggested, if you can monitor fan speeds and temps in BIOS I'd keep the machine off for a while to let it get to ambient temperature, then get into that BIOS screen and sit there. See what the speeds and temps do over time. Just keep refreshing the screen if that is needed. Things should stabilize somewhere after a couple minutes. If the temps keep climbing and it craps out, you've localized the problem somewhat. Al

With a new PC you shouldn't have to fuss around to get things working. Follow Franks advice first and isolate the problem to either the monitor or the PC. Another easy check before you dig into the OS is when it fails try booting and getting into the BIOS setup. If it comes up then that rules out OS and/or power setting issues. If it doesn't then back to isolating the problem. Can you hook that monitor to another PC? Right after it dies without turning it off? What kind of monitor? Most monitors will display a message when the cable is disconnected. See anything like that? It could always be the video card or chipset that is failing due to infant mortality, a term used to describe devices that fail prematurely. Al

Since this seems to be a random event I would suspect the beginning of a hardware failure or a thermal issue. If you feel comfortable digging into the guts try reseating the RAM, hard drive and optical drive and any other cards or devices that are accessable. How about dirt buildup enough to prevent the fan from cooling properly. Try blowing the thing out with compressed air. I'm amazed how much dust can accumulate in PC's that seem to be in a clean environment. While you have the RAM sticks out clean the contacts with 90% isopropyl alcohol. Hope this helps. Al

You are already doing the right thing backing up critical stuff on an external drive. In he event of a catastrophic hardware failure you're safe. On desktops I usually have a second HDD to cover my butt in the event of a hardware failure but on the lap I copy to a second partition so critical files reside in two places on the same drive, and less frequently to an external. It is convenient and with files residing in two physical places on the platter one should be readable in the event of a drive surface starting to go bad as happened to me recently with a new WD Scorpio that was struck by infant mortality after a few months. Also if you get infected chances are the infection will go after the C-drive and not the other partition. As for the size, that depends on how much space you need for the OS and your files. Hope this helps. Al

Ashy, You seem to have ruled out a lot unless you're getting errors on the remaining RAM too. Could be a printed wiring run on the MB that is intermittant or a power supply voltage that is out-of-limits and starting to cause problems. Had a new Intel MB once that had the same issues you are describing. Would sometimes run for a couple weeks then quit. Random freezups, crashes, etc and after a couple months of troubleshooting I traced it to a bad run near the RAM sockets. I can suggest you boot it up and start gently pressing on various areas of the MB to see if you can cause the problem. In my case it was so intermittant I wound up getting into BIOS and watching the clock tick. Pressing near the RAM sockets froze the clock. That's about as basic of a test as you can get. The way these multi-layer board are made it is quite possible to have a bad joint between a wiring run and a plated thru hole. Thermal cycling alone could have caused questionable joint to start failing. Hope this helps. Al

Charly, Hope things stay working OK. I tried killing AVG using MSCONFIG so it wouldn't even start but it didn't like something as the laptop hung partway through a boot. As in your case, something was still active. Uninstalling did the trick. Al

To follow up on my earlier post, the problem seemed to be AVG Antivirus free. Have no idea why it would get confused accessing the internet directly but not through a proxy server but at this point I don't care. Probably something to do with accessing multiple IP's v.s. a single IP to the proxy server. Uninstalled it and installed AVAST instead and all is well. Been running for a couple days now and no hangups. Advice, turn off firewalls and AV programs to see if the problem goes away. If it does, then you have found the culprit. Al

I don't have a solution yet but this problem seems somewhat similar to a problem I and friend are having, both running XP SP3 on laptops. She runs Firefox, I use IE8. Sometimes pages will not load or partially load and usually hitting the redX and stopping the load and refreshing will let the pages complete. We have two different ISP's, different locations, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, different Netgear routers, and so far I can find nothing in common except the OS. We've seen it using the OpenDNS server and her ISPs DNS server. Right now I'm at my home and dropped the MTU size setting on my router from the default of 1500 to 1300 and my problem seems to have gotten a little better but doing the same on her router seems to have had no effect. dslreports.com has some good info on MTU sizes. I don't fully understand some of this stuff but have seen some strange results pinging varous websites and seeing what packet sizes can be handles without fragmentation. Unlike the original post I don't seem to see problems with email or direct PC-PC interfacing using VNC. Only with browser usage. Maybe data packets aren't getting reassembled correctly or packets are missing, or a timing issue, but that doesn't explain everything. This was my thinking when I started horsing with the MTU size. I've tried going back to the default advanced browser settings....no different. During my last visit to WV I set my browser to us a proxy server at my home in PA and that slowed up accesses but did seem to reduce the problem. One particular website, poolforum.com, using an older version of VBulletin software wouldn't work for me at all from WV unless I went through my proxy server in PA. Still can't explain that. I have images of my OS going back 3 years and restoring to one of these may be my next step. Or maybe even the factory 'as delivered' configuration. When I get time I'll look into the firewall (ZoneAlarm) and killing other cryptic things that run in the background. It isn't my intention to hijack the thread but the problems seem similar and just thought commenting on what I've done and where I'm going might give someone some ideas. I'll keep an eye on this thread and post anything more I learn. PLEASE stay focused on the original posters problem and not mine. Thanks, Al

Depends on the fluid and other conditions. -- What did you spill? -- How long ago? -- Did you pull the battery and fully unpower the thing immediately? -- What actually did the liquid hit? With any kind of a spill whether it be a laptop, cell phone, or any electronic equipment, your best chance of preventing permanent damage is to kill all power as fast as possible. If you can take it apart and open things up, do it. Wash the parts with plain water followed by immersing in 90% isopropyl alcohol, then dry thoroughly. Drying could be pretty quick if you have compressed air and warmth or quite lenthy if it cannot be disassembled and all you have is warmth to aid drying. Of course there are no guarantees as with some electronics the parts are so sensitive that even the slightest bit of electrical conduction between printed wiring runs can electrically destroy components. This process has worked successfully for me on several cordless phones that have been dropped in my pool. Hope this helps. Al

An option on most wireless routers is to turn off broadcast of the SSID (access point name) and some network display software will show nothing, as if there is no signal. Or, the name of the access point will display as UNKNOWN. I assume this is a laptop so take it to a very populated area and see if you can pick up any signals. Outside of a Hospital, apartment building, etc. Al

You have to be looking for some common factor. Cables, some incompatability, thermal, etc. Are you doing anything odd like overclocking the processor? Almost sounds like an incompatability as if something is on the hairy edge level or timing wise and works most of the time. I had a similar problem with an Intel MB years ago that took months to find. Would run for weeks at a time, then go crazy. I know you swapped MBs but in my case it was a flaky printed wiring run on the board. Found it by getting into BIOS and looking at the clock ticking. About as simple as you can get. Saw the clock stop, then started gently pushing on the board and found it was sensitive around the RAM sockets. Maybe one of your cables could have a bad shield connection or something and letting noise be picked up on signal lines. Hope this gives you some ideas. Al

The Command Prompt Randy is referring to is a DOS screen, black background that works with text only. It is a very basic function. The Ping command sends a specific network request to the target, in this case the Yahoo server, and if set up to allow, the Yahoo server will return a ping response. This is a very basic network request to see if a path is alive. If the ping to Yahoo fails then try ping 209.191.93.53 which is the IP address of the Yahoo server. By using the IP address instead of the name Yahoo you bypass whatever DNS server your ISP is using. DNS is the thing that converts a name to an IP address. If this all fails then in that same command prompt window type ipconfig and you should see several lines returned and the one you are interested in is ip address.............. This will tell you if your PC has been assigned an IP address by either your ISP or your router if you have a router. Let us know what you see. You may also describe your setup such as are you using a router? and if so a make and model number. Hope this helps. Al PS: Sorry...my French is non-existant.