Any assistance is gratefully accepted. I have a Gateway M360 series notebook- it’s about 1.5 years old, runs Windows XP, and up until now I’ve had no issues with it at all.
The other day I went to turn it on and nada- nothing. Well, the power was being received; when I pushed the power button the light around it lit and the first indicator light came on (the network light). The other indicator lights flashed for a moment, then went out and stayed out.
I repowered it off and on (a million times, probably), I tried booting to the CD ( I could hear the CD drive spinning, but it did nothing- no indicator lights), absolutely nothing worked. I tried removing the battery and using AC only, nothing. I tried removing and putting the battery back in, nothing (I’d had a similar issue with a Compaq laptop a few years ago and that would reset it when this sort of thing happened)
2 days later (I kept trying) when I got home last night I turned it on and LO AND BEHOLD! It worked!!! Powered up just like normal, works fine. Like nothing ever happened.
So my question is, geeks, do you have any idea what might have happened or how to prevent it from happening again? Do you think it’s some part that’s breaking and it will die entirely? If you have seen this before and have a theory, I’d be interested in hearing it.
This is a work computer for me and I do regular backups. I work from home so I do my own maintainence- I regularly run spyware cleaners, virus scans, and have had no issues.
The ONLY thing I’ve noticed over the past few months is occasionally when the AC power is plugged in, it will flip back and forth from battery to AC like the plug isn’t quite in the back port exactly right- it’s possible that there’s a short in that cord near the part that plugs into the machine.
The only new thing I’ve been using on it is a USB floppy drive, but that’s been for about 3 months and this just happened over the weekend.