Help?

[Andrew49]

Not necessarily. Cables are flexible but sockets are not. It might have been the cable putting strain on the socket so that it lifts out of the board (or on cheaper components actually breaks the socket itself). Wiggling the cable may cause the socket pins to make electrical contact with the motherboard again and work, temporarily.

True enough. Some wires in the electrical cables are microscopic and will weaken over time - especially if its constantly inserted and taken out of the socket. I'm only imparting knowledge from my own experiences of PCs/Laptops - admittedly only from 1986. I've seen too many PCs/Laptops thrown out due to easily fixable problems. My advice is to leave it inserted from day one.

Most of the componentry is surface mount and very small. A failed diode might not even display any carbonising and most people can't tell a diode from a resistor, capacitor. The electrolytic capacitors on the power lines are more likely to fail, split and ooze gunge. Just on the whole idea of opening up a laptop, if you aren't a professional it is not really a good idea because apart from a few replaceable boards, the harddrive, the dvd drive and the fans, there's little that can be done without the proper equipment.

Regards...jmcc

If the laptop out of warranty - and it's not a cable fault - then the best piece of equipment is a screwdriver. Don't be scared of opening the laptop .... there's nothing loose inside!

Then your senses come in to play ... well two of them ... sight and smell.



BadCaps

If it's possible to get a fully charged battery do so - and the laptop boots up - backup your data onto another drive. Laptop hard drives though are easily removed and can be placed in an enclosure for data retrieval.

SIX YEARS! Wow! That's impressive - very impressive!. Seems to me it just got tired!

LINK Acer Aspire V3-571

[Baron von Biffo]

Time to call in SuperMoron?

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtqZ2XbxQws"]Father Shoots Laptop Teaches Daughter Child a Lesson About Facebook ORIGINAL! DAD - YouTube[/ame]

[5intheface]

Thanks again all, had it checked out and the charger fine. Seems to be a regular fault with the soldering in the dc unit which has to be fixed professionally.

At 5 years old, running a fan to keep it from shutting down and £90 to get the jack fixed, I've bitten the bullet and gone for a Dell Inspiron.

Half an hour from opening the box to writing this so first impressions good.

*cue calls of 'you idiot' from technical experts.

[Secret Squirrel]

Sorry for your loss Five'.

If there's anything I can do to help, PM me.

[Baron von Biffo]

I'm looking for a little help with Xubuntu on a laptop.

One of my siblings had a Compaq Presario CQ60 that got very hot and died. He took it in for repair and was told the motherboard was toast. The repair guy put the hard drive into a little USB box so it can be used as an external drive.

Having nothing better to do and being of a curious disposition I took the remains off him and took the whole thing apart. The fan was jammed up with a big plug of lint. I got rid of that, put it back together and booted up using a Ubuntu CD. Lo and behold it worked.

Next I tried to see if I could run it off a memory stick. After some false starts I have it running Xubuntu 12.04.1 LTS on a small format SanDisk flash drive. It sees my broadband, email works and I'm posting this from it.

The only problem is that when it boots up it starts with a menu that offers to Run, Install to the non-existent hard drive and a few other options. Is there some sort of Autoexec.bat file that I can edit to get rid of the menu and go directly to the Run option?

Googling hasn't got me anywhere where a non-anorak can breathe the air so any help would be gratefully received.

[TotalMayhem]

Not really, the what Live CDs do, they offer you a variety of boot options at the start.

autoexec.bat is DOS speak and unbeknownst to the Linux world.

Looking up the specs of that laptop, you better ditch Ubuntu. Later versions (Gnome 3 and Unity) are quite demanding and not really cut out for that single core Celery processor. Try Zenwalk, a real beauty and a lot faster on that machine. Novice-friendly and comes with all necessary multimedia codecs pre-installed.

P.S. Why don't you get a cheap SSD? 64 GB costs 60 yoyos. Faster than any platter HDD and robust (no moving parts).

Oh, and shoot the "repair guy"!

[Baron von Biffo]

Not really, the what Live CDs do, they offer you a variety of boot options at the start.

The system is booting from a USB memory stick at this stage - No CD involved so I thought there might be some way to bypass the menu and just boot straight to the OS.

autoexec.bat is DOS speak and unbeknownst to the Linux world.

Yeah, I was just looking for the best way to explain what I was after. Does Linux have any similar file for controlling what happens at boot time?

Looking up the specs of that laptop, you better ditch Ubuntu. Later versions (Gnome 3 and Unity) are quite demanding and not really cut out for that single core Celery processor. Try Zenwalk, a real beauty and a lot faster on that machine. Novice-friendly and comes with all necessary multimedia codecs pre-installed.

P.S. Why don't you get a cheap SSD? 64 GB costs 60 yoyos. Faster than any platter HDD and robust (no moving parts).

To be honest, it's not worth spending money on. The old hard drive was tested and it's ok, it's still working as an external drive, so there must be some problem with the bit of the motherboard that connects to it.

Even without that, I wouldn't spend anything on a laptop that someone like me had taken apart and put back together.

The choice of Ubuntu was because I've tried various other Linux versions over the years and it's the only one I found that 'just works'. It identifies any hardware on my PCs and can run it whereas other versions will have problems with network adapters or monitors etc. And it's not as if I have any exotic gear. As a Windows user it's also quite intuitive to use.

Thanks for the tip about ZenWalk. Since it's running from a flash drive I'll download it and give it a go. At most the laptop will be used for web browsing and email so there won't be huge demands on the system.

Oh, and shoot the "repair guy"!

To be fair to him, his first question was, 'Are you sure you want to spend money fixing that thing?'

[TotalMayhem]

The system is booting from a USB memory stick at this stage'

Whether you run a Live CD from a disk or a bootable USB stick / SD card doesn't matter, the principle is the the same.

But you can install Ubuntu onto the SD card.

There is also a Ubuntu flavor with Xfce (same lightweight desktop environment as Zenwalk).

[Baron von Biffo]

Whether you run a Live CD from a disk or a bootable USB stick / SD card doesn't matter, the principle is the the same.

Ah, so it's the 'Live' bit that's the problem. I just assumed that if it was on a flash drive I could edit it.

But you can install Ubuntu onto the SD card.

Before I make another unwarranted assumption - For my purposes, is an SD card is exactly the same as a flash drive?

There is also a Ubuntu flavor with Xfce (same lightweight desktop environment as Zenwalk).

It's Xubuntu I have at the moment - By accident rather than design. I clicked the wrong link in the LiveUSB creator.

[TotalMayhem]

SD cards are flash memory, but their transfer speed in general is rather slow, same as USB sticks. They don't perform like SSD drives on a SATA controller.

If you have the Xubuntu ISO, create a Live CD, boot from CD and then install it to your SD card.

[Baron von Biffo]

SD cards are flash memory, but their transfer speed in general is rather slow, same as USB sticks. They don't perform like SSD drives on a SATA controller.

If you have the Xubuntu ISO, create a Live CD, boot from CD and then install it to your SD card.

My largest SD card is only 4Gb and anyway they stick out quite far at the side of the laptop. What I'd like to do is to keep using the small flash drive below. Will it function the same as an SD card?

[TotalMayhem]

In a word, yes.

BTW, a 16 GB SD card costs 15 yoyos these days.

[Baron von Biffo]

In a word, yes.

BTW, a 16 GB SD card costs 15 yoyos these days.

An SD card with reader sticks out quite far from the side of the laptop making for a high risk of getting snapped off. The small flash drive fits very snugly so it's a better option given that laptops get moved around a lot.

[TotalMayhem]

I see, you don't have a built in card reader, you're using a USB adapter.

One thing to keep in mind, flash memory cells only have limited write cycles and when that is reached, they die. This limit is much lower with cheap USB sticks/SD cards than with real solid state disks and web browsers in particular tend to write a lot to disk (browser cache).

If you run a Live CD, everything is happening in the system memory and nothing is written to disk. So I'd rather bite the bullet and use a normal Live CD (from USB if you want). It may be a little inconvenient and take a bit longer to boot but the overall performance will be better as the write speed to flash memory via USB is dreadfully slow.

I have a "broken" Eee PC 1005HA here, nothing really wrong with it, except bad sectors on the HDD and replacing it is a real pain in the behind. So just for the fun, I'm using this from SD card.

[Baron von Biffo]

I see, you don't have a built in card reader, you're using a USB adapter.

One thing to keep in mind, flash memory cells only have limited write cycles and when that is reached, they die. This limit is much lower with cheap USB sticks/SD cards than with real solid state disks and web browsers in particular tend to write a lot to disk (browser cache).

If you run a Live CD, everything is happening in the system memory and nothing is written to disk. So I'd rather bite the bullet and use a normal Live CD (from USB if you want). It may be a little inconvenient and take a bit longer to boot but the overall performance will be better as the write speed to flash memory via USB is dreadfully slow.

I have a "broken" Eee PC 1005HA here, nothing really wrong with it, except bad sectors on the HDD and replacing it is a real pain in the behind. So just for the fun, I'm using this from SD card.

Thanks for the help on this TM.

There is a card reader on the machine but it doesn't work, possibly as a result of my tinkering.

What's driving me on this is just the fun of getting the thing running from the flash drive rather than any hope of the laptop having a long term future. With the flash drive I can set up a permanent email account, a connection to my broadband and other small customisations but with a CD I'd have to put all that stuff in every time I booted.