Dead or Alive?

[marisa406]

I have a Gateway M285-E Tablet which has worked great and been my primary tool for school. One day though - it just stopped turning on.

When you press the on switch it sounds as if the computer is working fine, but no screen shows. Cool air comes out of the fans on the side.

My friend in the school tech department took a look at it, hooked it up to a monitor, turned it on, and frantically pressed all the F# buttons he could at once - which displayed my BIOS on his screen. We disconnected it and tried my laptop by itself and it worked again!

Later that day, it didn't work again.

What could be wrong?

 

[Harper]

How old is it?

 

[marisa406]

a little over two years. It's not a baby, but it shouldn't be dead yet I don't think. It only came with a year's warranty.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Could be a bad lamp in the LCD screen that won't let you see the image, or there is a bad connection of some sort....

 

[marisa406]

hooked it up to another monitor and started pressing the F buttons like crazy like my friend did. No luck. I'm worried my hard drive is going. This is the M285

My other, older laptop, which I'm on now keeps shutting down randomly, could that be the fan? This baby I bought in '05.

 

[marisa406]

So I took it to the tech guys at my school, who by the way offered to let me volunteer and learn!

They couldn't fix it, but told me to try the problem here with a few more details.

They hooked it up to a monitor again, and somehow got it to boot up - not sure how. The settings were on LCD & CRT in the BIOS so they changed it to just LCD. He also changed the monitor settings in windows. If you boot it up it works sometimes now, but sometimes it doesn't and you have to press F2 (which should bring you to the BIOS) but instead will allow windows to start loading. A live ubuntu CD booted fine. Anyone have any ideas as to this mystery?