About 7 years ago I had a nice Sony Viao Laptop. This baby was top of the line at the time, with 150MGhz Pentium processor, 16MB RAM and a 2GB hard drive. Good stuff. The laptop used to sit on a TV table at the end of the bed (I was living with my girlfriend of the time). At some point a glass of pop was left sitting on the TV table next to the laptop. Big mistake, as it took just 30 seconds to bump into the table and send the pop all over the laptop. Needless to say, this was the end of the laptop.
I did take the laptop into a dealer for repair, but they said it would need a new motherboard and that would cost more than a new laptop. So I put the laptop away, never to be used again.
Fast Forward 7 years to last Tuesday. I found the laptop in its carrying case as I was cleaning up the basement. So I figure what the hell, lets see what will happen if I plug it in and power it up. Holy power surge Batman! The thing actually fired up. I was able to scan through the file system and see several files I’d like to recover.
So last night I sat with the laptop and tried to get a wireless network card installed on it. First I tried a spare Linksys card I had. I should have know better, I had problems with that card on my current laptop. I spent almost an hour fooling around with it and couldn’t get it to see the access point properly. So, I pulled out my current laptop and took the Orinoco Gold card I use on it and put it in the old Sony. 15 minutes later I had a working woreless connection. So I then made a few changes to the network setting so it could see the network domain and then rebooted the machine.
Here is where my victory comes to a complete end. On reboot I log into the domain and the machine comes to a stop. Everything just hangs. So I power it down and try to boot it again. This time all I get is some beeps. Probably signals that would tell a technician what is wrong. So now I’m back to square one with a dead laptop.
Since she won’t work now, I figure I’ll go ahead with the autopsy. Who knows maybe I can figure out how to clean it up enough to get it working again. Or maybe I should just put it away again for another 5-7 years. It might start working again.