Busted Laptop? Help! | The Coffeehouse

sysrpl

I need some advice here, because I am not too sure what is going on with my laptop. It is exhibiting some very strange behaviour and I'd like to know if anyone recognizes these symptoms and perhaps relay more information about the root problem if possibly.

The symptoms: Occasional problems include mouse clicks being ignored, menu items from all apps system wide are megred into a single menu, cannot drag windows, keyboard cannot be used to change the focused control. Alt tabbing to different app, and back to the same app seems to fix the problem, but sometimes it reoccurs again very soon.

Possible causes: I installed the beta nvidia driver for xp to experiment with opencl. I wrote an application which froze my video and the computer got really hot, at which point i had to reset. This happened over the weekend, and now I am experiencing the problems occasionally, and sometimes often.

What I've tried: Using the touchpad instead of the mouse. Uninstalling the video driver, installing the old video driver. Shutting down startup services and programs through msconfig. Installing a new version of Windows.

OS: Windows XP 32 bit SP3

Hardware: Vostro 1500 laptop, 4GB RAM, Intel Core Duo 2GHz, nVidia 8600m GS

Yup, and I tried installing Windows 7 to fix these problem, but they are still happening (albiet a bit more infrequently). The weird things is, I even encountered the same problems during windows setup.

Has anyone ever heard of a hardware failure causing problems like the ones I've described? I am wondering if my laptop is essentially toast.

spivonious

That's a really strange set of symptoms. Some of them sound like hardware issues, others software, but since you've tried the touchpad instead of the mouse and reinstalled Windows, that kind of rules out both.

Since the problems occur more frequently with Win7, and Win7 stresses the parts more than XP does, I'd have to guess that the motherboard has some burned out components. Have you tried using it on both battery and plugged in?

Dexter

menu items from all apps system wide are megred into a single menu

That deserves a screenshot Perplexed .

Anyway since re-installing Windows doesn't fix it I guess the hardware is fried. But that would be strangest case of "fried" hardware I've ever seen. Any bluescreens or other errors in addition to that big list of "interaction" issues you mentioned?

Or maybe you got a virus? And somehow it is still alive after installing Windows?

sushovande
Smiley Face Sharp

menu items from all apps system wide are megred into a single menu

Your Windows is transmogrifying into Mac OS X!

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to sushovande

#Oct 14th @ 1:15 PM

This reminds me never to use OpenCL.

sysrpl

I switched out my mouse and flashed my mobo bios from A1 to A6. I am hoping these things have fixed my problems.

The mouse I was usings was a gaming mouse with a speed switcher buttons to dynamically change the mouse. When I was using the touchpad the mouse was still plugged in. Also, maybe the bios flash fixed it. I should be able to tell if the problem is gone after a little while. I will report then.

spivonious

In reply to sysrpl

#Oct 14th @ 1:18 PM

Also, you probably did this anyway, but clear the partitions on the hard drive before reinstalling Windows. That will make sure any virus is really gone.

sysrpl

In reply to spivonious

#Oct 15th @ 6:54 AM

I fixed it.

The problem was a bad mouse. What was/is weird is that after you plug in the bad mouse, the system is hosed even if you swap it out with a good mouse. You have to reboot and never plug in the bad mouse, then there is no problem. After you plug in the bad mouse, there is no recovery other than a reboot. In this way the problem was hard to detect. I was only able to confirm it by trying the mouse on a different system.

Weird huh?

spivonious

In reply to sysrpl

#Oct 15th @ 7:44 AM

That's very strange. Glad you found the source of the problem. I would have never even thought of it being the mouse, especially when the touchpad exhibited the same symptoms.

sysrpl

In reply to spivonious

#Oct 15th @ 7:45 AM

Tomorrow at work there will be a ritual destruction of this mouse in the vein of Office Space.