Dicky laptop

[brass monkey]

It's been on all day every day for 7 years and I'd hate to dump it, but - It started to lose text under the desktop icons, reboot and it seemed ok, same again a bit later. Click on say "file" in IE and the drop down did, but blank, but positions were clickable. Quick start menu (for explorer) would'nt work but windows/E did. All went very slow, reboot and ok for a while. I reimaged and couldn't even start in safe mode. Did a memory test, fine. Fitted an older drive which came from the machine, much the same but it did go into safe mode (sometimes) so I disabled virtually everything in device manager. It then seemed to work. It re-enabled the video card by itself, still ok. I enabled the wifi - BSOD. Disabled it and used a wifi dongle - worked. An hour or so later, back to square one. Any ideas guys? T'would be a damn shame not to try a bit harder. Cheers.

[NT]

Some versions of windows are prone to self corrupting over time. 9 out of 10 problems are down to software not hardware. A relatively easy way to check if the basic hardware's ok is to set bios to boot from dvd first, hdd second, insert a linux antix disc and power on. Odds are it'll work fine - dont worry about peripherals initially. Doing that doesnt make any changes at all to the windows install.

NT

[michael adams]

As you said, you re-imaged. By which I assume you mean you loaded an image of a previous install which is known to be ok.

So all the software suggestions would seem to be wide of the mark

If things happen after an hour this suggests maybe a heat problem somewhere - i.e it takes an hour to reach the critical temperature.

Swapping around componenets may have allowed the heat to dissapate while the case was open and so muddied the waters.

So it may be a matter or removing dust build-up or replacing a fan.

michael adams

...

[brass monkey]

I might be speaking too soon, but I re-imaged with a recent image, started in safe mode, killed the wifi adapter, installed a wifi dongle.

*whisper* it's been working for a couple of hours but tomorrow is another day ;) Thanks for the suggestions folks. Fingers crossed.